Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software released the latest revenue figures for its online storefront Steam, tracking the top 20 Steam releases for October of this year.
Rather than tracking pure sales figures, Valve calculates its top 20 in terms of revenue generated during the two weeks following the games’ release.
By that metric, Bungie’s Destiny 2 was the clear winner. This marked the long-running first-person shooter’s PC debut, alongside going free-to-play with the New Light program, as well as the release of the Shadowkeep expansion. Bungie, which is also based in Bellevue, has made a point this year of reorganizing the game and recharting its course following its split from former publisher Activision Blizzard, and so far, it seems its new direction is paying off. While you can play most of Destiny 2 for free, you do have to pay to get access to the game’s most recent expansions.
According to Valve, Destiny 2 on Steam peaked at nearly 300,000 concurrent players, and enjoyed substantial crossover with other titles; nearly 20 percent of those who played other top 20 games in October also gave Destiny 2 a shot.
Other winners in October included Indivisible, a years-in-the-making RPG/platformer from the team behind the cult hit fighting game Skullgirls; Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince, a new game in the fantasy/comedy series by Finnish developers Frozenbyte; and Disco Elysium, a combat-free surreal narrative RPG that’s quietly snuck onto a lot of fans and journalists’ Game of the Year lists. Grid, a reboot of the long-running racing series from English developers Codemasters, managed to score No. 6 on the list despite extremely mixed reviews.
One of the bigger surprises here is the presence of Visual Concepts’s WWE 2K20, the latest entry in the wrestling franchise’s video game line, which launched with some truly spectacular bugs and hasn’t quite managed to crawl out of that hole at time of writing. The fact that it still managed to make some money at launch despite being a leading contender for the most initially-busted video game release of 2019 is testament to the power of branding in the marketplace.
Notably, two of the entries in the top 20 are Early Access games, where the makers are funding their title’s completion through early sales. This includes Postal 4, a somewhat-inexplicable new game in the deliberately-tasteless Postal series from Tucson-based studio Running With Scissors, and Chernobylite, a first-person survival horror game from Polish studio The Farm 51, formed by veterans of the cult hit FPS Painkiller.
tinyBuild’s asymmetric multiplayer game Secret Neighbor snuck onto the list at No. 19. You probably saw the game’s titular Neighbor one way or another if you were at this year’s PAX in Seattle, as it seemed like you couldn’t go two steps in the convention center without seeing someone with a Neighbor mask or plush toy. Upon its release, it appears to have attracted a small but fervent crowd; as per SteamCharts, its player count has barely dropped at all since it launched.
The full top 20 list is as follows:
- Destiny 2 (Bungie; Bellevue, Wash.)
- Indivisible (Lab Zero Games; Los Angeles, Calif.)
- Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince (Frozenbyte; Helsinki, Finland)
- Doraemon: Story of Seasons (Marvelous Inc. & Brownies Inc.; Tokyo, Japan)
- Mistover (Krafton Inc.; Seongnam, South Korea)
- Grid (Codemasters; Southam, UK)
- Pine (Twirlbound; Breda, Netherlands)
- We Were Here Together (Total Mayhem Games; Rotterdam, Netherlands)
- Postal 4: No Regerts (Running With Scissors; Tucson, Ariz.)
- Chernobylite (The Farm 51; Gliwice, Poland)
- Disco Elysium (ZA/UM; London, England)
- The Jackbox Party Pack 6 (Jackbox Games; Chicago, Ill.)
- ArcheAge: Unchained (XLGAMES; Seongnam, South Korea)
- Autonauts (Denki; Scotland)
- Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition (h.a.n.d. inc.; Sapporo, Japan)
- WWE 2K20 (Visual Concepts; Novato, Calif.)
- Crossroads Inn (Kraken Unleashed; Warsaw, Poland)
- Richman10 (Softstar Technology; Beijing, China)
- Secret Neighbor (tinyBuild, Hologryph, & Dynamic Pixels; Bellevue, WA, Ukraine, & Moscow, Russia)
- Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout (Koei Tecmo; Yokohama, Japan)
