Over 14,500 games made their way toValve’s Steam platform in 2023, according to a quick look atSteamDB'. This continues a four-year streak of Steam breaking its record each year, though releases in general have ballooned dramatically in the past ten years as Valve loosened Steam publishing requirements with what eventually becameSteam Direct.
Now, make no mistake: we can’t guarantee that even a majority of these games are actually worth your money or your time. However, there’s a bit more to this giant number of PC Steam releases than meets the eye, and we can actually dig into that deeper meat ourselves by taking a closer look at Valve’s officialBest of 2023 page— particularly the “New Releases” tab, since “Top Sellers” includes games released in past years that are still successful today.
According to the FAQ included by Valve at the bottom of this page, a total of 100 games are included in each category, divided into 4 tiers. These tiers are Bronze for the lower 51 games, Silver for 50th up to 25th place, Gold for 24th through 13th place, and finally Platinum for the Top 12. The sales data used for creating these tiers is from January 1st of 2023 to December 15th of 2023.
Dominating the Platinum category is co-op heist shooterPayday 3, city simCities: Skylines II, and solo-or-co-op horror titleSons of the Forest. A number of other prominent AAA and AA games also pepper the Top 12, like the mech-combat RPGArmored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, 2D fighterStreet Fighter 6, and fan-favorite DnD-styled RPGBaldur’s Gate.
Surprisingly, some games with notoriously bad PC performance still managed to make their way high onto Steam’s best-selling games of 2023.Star Wars: Jedi Survivorsuffers fromnotoriously awful PC performance issuesdespite its otherwise stellar production value, and it seems like sheer brand recognition has still managed to carry it right into Steam’s Top 12 New Releases of 2023.
That said, any game that managed to make it onto Steam’s Best Of 2023 page (based primarily on sales data) achieved something of an impressive feat when it had to outsell 14 thousand other games to do it.
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Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
