Steam's Best Of 2023 charts the year's best sellers and most played

Valve have put together their “Best Of 2023” lists on Steam. This is different from the Steam Awards, voting for which is ongoing, and instead is built from Steam data like revenue, peak concurrent players, and so on. It’s interesting every year as older games or indie obscurities do better than you expect.

For any data based on revenue, the games are separated into buckets called platinum, gold, silver and bronze. Position within those buckets is then randomized. There’s therefore no way to know whether Baldur’s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 made more money in 2023, but they’re both in the Platinum bucket, which puts them among the top twelve grossing games on Steam.

Deep sea sushi scavenger Dave The Diver appears in the bronze tier, alongside Lies Of P and Atomic Heart, forever-games RimWorld, Terraria and Stardew Valley, and 2019’s Sekiro. The Finals doesn’t appear anywhere in the top 100, until you filter for just games released in 2023, at which point it’s in the gold tier. Goose Goose Duck was one of only 11 games to register over 300,000 concurrent players

There are also filters to view just early access, VR or Steam Deck games. Each category has its own set of caveats for what data is used, which you can view at the bottom of each page. Probably, if someone was so inclined, it would be possible to cross-reference the listings with publicly available financial information to ballpark how much money a “platinum” game makes. But I’m not so inclined.

You can find the whole thing at the Steam site.