Valve has released their yearly assessment of games on Steam by total revenue, providing a look into what’s selling best on PC’s biggest games platform from the source with the most data. The Best of 2020 page has a variety of data, counting in six categories: Top Sellers, New Releases, Most Played, Early Access Grads, Best of VR, and Controller Games. Valve gives these lists out of order, so while we don’t know which game was the top seller, we do know which games were the top 12, then 13-24th, 25th-40th, and 41st-100th.
Surprising no-one, the games that went big on Steam are the games we’ve been watching shatter records all year. Valve’s free-to-play Dota 2 and CS:GO did well, as did perennial successes Grand Theft Auto V and Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. Viral hits like Among Us and Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, alongside your standard big game releases round out the lineup.
Here are the 12 top sellers for 2020, as measured by gross revenue:
- Dota 2
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds
- Doom Eternal
- Monster Hunter World
- Rainbow Six: Siege
- Destiny 2
- Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Among Us
Perhaps the only surprising find there is Monster Hunter: World, which launched two years ago but in 2020 outsold highly anticipated games like Mount & Blade 2 and Crusader Kings 3, which only fell into the 13-24th best-selling games category.
Here are the 11 most played games of 2020, as decided by achieving peak concurrent player count over 200,000. It’s a very similar list:
- Dota 2
- Among Us
- Terraria
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Life is Strange 2
- Monster Hunter World
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord
- Destiny 2
- Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds
- Grand Theft Auto V
Life is Strange 2 might surprise some there, a certain type of head-down gamer who doesn’t quite realize how popular narrative games have become. You can head over to Valve’s Best of 2020 page for the other categories, or to their Best of 2020 blog post to learn how it works.