Over 14,500 games made their way to Valve’s Steam platform in 2023, according to a quick look at SteamDB’. 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 became Steam 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 official Best 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 shooter Payday 3city sim Cities: Skylines IIand solo-or-co-op horror title Sons of the Forest. A number of other prominent AAA and AA games also pepper the Top 12, like the mech-combat RPG Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon2D fighter Street Fighter 6and fan-favorite DnD-styled RPG Baldur’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 Survivor suffers from notoriously awful PC performance issues despite 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.
