Starfield is surprisingly absent from Steam's 2024 bestsellers list despite taking a top spot in 2023
Valve has published its annual Best of Steam list for 2024, ranking the year's top games in various categories. The top-sellers list for 2024 bears a lot of similarity to that one 2023, with one notable exception: Starfield is nowhere to be seen.
Valve doesn't release sales data for individual games, so we can't say how much any particular title on the list pulled in: Instead, they're randomly sorted in «buckets»—platinum, gold, silver, and bronze—indicating their relative success. Given the number of games released every month on Steam, even a bronze-tier ranking represents a significant success.
Five of the 12 games in the platinum category—PUBG Battlegrounds, Destiny 2, Dota 2, Counter-Strike 2, and Apex Legends—are free to play, and all five were ranked in the same category in 2023, a testament to the lucrative value of a free-to-play hit. At the other end of the spectrum, Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 are both hanging in there: Elden Ring no doubt benefited from the release of the outstanding Shadow of the Erdtree expansion in June, but Baldur's Gate 3 maintaining its spot more than a year after release—with numerous meaty updates to its credit but no full-on DLC—is something of a surprise. Black Myth: Wukong and Helldivers 2 also made the cut, as did Space Marine 2, Black Ops 6, and Palworld.
As I mentioned, I also find it interesting that Starfield has dropped out of the list completely. Every platinum game from 2023 is somewhere in the 2024 ranking—further down the list in some cases (Sons of the Forest, for instance, is a bronze tier game this year)—but Starfield, unless I've overlooked it, is completely out. That's not meant as a dump on Starfield, I just find it genuinely surprising: Bethesda's sci-fi RPG didn't live up to the hype when it launched in August 2023 but that was an almost impossible bar to reach anyway, and it's not like it was a bad game, just not the expected leap forward on the formula.
The seeming drop-off in interest in Starfield
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