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 charts have only included revenue from premium game purchases, but that was obscuring the hugely popular free or inexpensive games in which players purchase season passes, huge expansions, or other forms of new content.” It adds that multiple editions of a game can also be combined to avoid any duplicate entries muddying the statistics.
You can check out the Steam Charts page for yourself at that link. Hopefully this marks the start of further overhauls to the platform from Valve, as many PC players say that Steam guides are a mess to use. In related news, a recent update makes it easier to claim free Steam games and DLC, and some users have called for more consistent Steam age checks to be enforced across the platform’s library.
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