Valve published their annual end of year charts, The Best of 2017. Sales and user stats are taken from their popular digital distribution platform Steam to list the biggest and most popular PC games of the year.
The categories are separated into Top Sellers, Top New Releases, Top Selling VR Games, Top Early Access Graduates, and Most Played (Simultaneous Players). Games are ranked in each category from Platinum to Bronze, though it’s not explained where the actual numbers fall (Valve does not usually disclose sales numbers).
Platinum Best Sellers aren’t a big surprise, featuring the hugely popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Other popular multiplayer games continue to sell very well, including Counter-Strike, Dota 2, and Rocket League. Ark: Survival Evolved continued to have legs this year, as did The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The biggest surprise is probably Divinity: Original Sin II, which actually launched this year.
The Best New Releases list the best-selling games for each month of the year. This category shows the usual Summer gaming slump as June and July were some of the slowest months (June had only five games make the list, none of which were very big). It’s also not clear how much revenue a game must earn to make this monthly list.
Early Access Graduates highlighted those games which were previously available in Early Access and then officially released this year. Platinum best-sellers include Kickstarter RPGs Torment: Tides of Numenera and Divinity: Original Sin 2. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is of course on this list (though still in Early Access on Xbox One) as well as ARK: Survival Evolved, which originally came out in Early Access back in 2015 before launching later this year.
Most Played is the only category that gives specific numbers. Steam lists both concurrent and peak daily users for all games right in the client. The top category of over 100,000 players is actually hilariously low for games like Dota 2 (one million players) and especially PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which consistently has anywhere between one and three million players. Rainbow Six Siege, Warframe, and ARK: Survival Evolved just squeak in at around 100,000 peak players each.
Most of these games are still on sale from the Steam Winter Sale, which ends January 4.
