These were the biggest games on Steam (and Steam Deck) in 2023

polygon.com:

Valve offered a peek behind the curtain of Steam’s biggest games of 2023 on Wednesday, revealing which titles dominated the sales charts on PC gaming’s biggest digital platform. Valve also divulged which games Steam users — and Steam Deck owners — played the most this year, with Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, and Sons of the Forest appearing in multiple top-12 lists.

Some of the data won’t be too surprising to Steam users who pay attention to Valve’s publicly available stats; perennial Steam favorites like Counter-Strike 2 (née Counter-Strike: Global Offensive), Dota 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Apex Legends are well represented in the best-selling and most-played games lists. But 2023 brought new contenders, like The Finals and Lethal Company, to Steam’s most-played games.

Valve doesn’t provide specific sales figures or numbered rankings, but rather reveals the top-100 Steam games across multiple categories, breaking each 100-game list into multiple tiers based on sales or play performance:

The company’s data spans Jan. 1 to Dec. 15 of this year, so high-performing 2023 latecomers like The Finals mostly missed out on higher rankings on Valve’s lists. Here’s a breakdown of the biggest, most-played, and best-selling games on Steam this year.

The top 12 (platinum-tier) games on Steam, based on total gross revenue earned in 2023, includes plenty of free-to-play titles like Apex Legends and Lost Ark, alongside paid premium games like Hogwarts Legacy and Starfield. (Publisher Activision also lists Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, and Warzone as simply Call of Duty on Steam, to explain that naming convention.)

Appearing just outside of the top 12, in the “gold” sales tier, are stalwart games like