Valve has taken matters into its own hands with a new Steam charts feature showcasing the best selling games on the platform in an official capacity. Previously, PC gaming fans had to turn to third-party websites to track the most popular Steam games, but now Valve is offering a detailed look in real-time at the games that are seeing the most success on the storefront.
The new Steam Charts page is Valve’s answer to a number of third-party sites including SteamDB, SteamSpy, and SteamCharts that have all previously offered data on Valve’s platform and which games are performing best. It replaces the old Steam stats page, and offers real-time rankings for top sellers and most played games, as well as additional weekly and monthly breakdowns.
The charts themselves are really cool – much like music charts such as the US Billboard charts, they show how many weeks a game has been in the charts and how far a game has climbed up or fallen down the rankings since the previous week. You can also see a game’s current player count and its daily peak, much as you could with the previous Steam stats page. It goes all the way back to 2004, when Counter-Strike was the only game on the charts, and also includes historical records for games no longer on the platform.
Valve notes that “the new top-selling lists rank games based on total revenue, including all sources such as DLC and in-game transactions” to give a more complete picture of the games that are seeing success. With an increased number of games focusing on long-term support and ‘live service’ models, this new model should give a clearer picture of the success of such games.
Free PC games will also be included on the charts, with Valve saying that “traditionally our top sellers
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