Steam Will Now Show You Best-Sellers Going Back 21 Years

Steam has been around for over 21 years, and it’s turning 22 in a few months. That’s a big number. And a lot of releases have debuted on the platform through that timeframe. Now, Steam is gaining a bestsellers list that goes back until the launch of Half-Life 2—the first in-house game Valve debuted on Steam.

Steam has announced a significant update to its monthly top-release charts, and the changes make the system way more comprehensive than ever—and make it act as a luck of time capsule. The revamped system now showcases the top 50 revenue-generating games released each month. And this system has a lot of months—it goes all the way back to November 2004, which coincides with the release month of Half-Life 2.

We’re missing 13 months here, from September 2003 to October 2004, but to be fair, Steam only really took off following the launch of Half-Life 2. As a reminder, Steam was initially conceived by Valve as a method for users to easily download and update Valve’s games, a catalog that included games such as the original Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, and Counter-Strike. It was afterward thought of as a general storefront for PC games from all developers. Calculating over 200 months of data that dates back two decades is not an easy task, so Steam resorted to automating these lists rather than manually curating them. Still, it’s pretty cool.

You can explore the top releases of a given month by watching their trailers directly within the chart interface. The top 50 releases of each month categorized into three tiers: gold, silver, and bronze. The top 12 performing games of the month achieve gold status, the next 12 are designated as silver, and the remaining 26 releases fall into the bronze tier. Some DLCs can be games in and of themselves, so they can be ranked among the top 50 game releases of that month. And there’s also a dedicated “DLC For You” section, which will highlight DLC released during the month for games already present in a user’s library.

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The bottom of each monthly chart page now includes a few filtering options if you want to narrow down a search. Players can narrow down the top 50 list by genre, theme, style, supported features, or tags. The methodology for compiling these charts relies on the revenue generated by each game within its first two weeks of release. This initial sales performance determines a game’s position and tier in the monthly rankings—you might not see your favorite games, but the list focuses on the best-selling ones instead.

Source: Valve