Update to Ars Technica's Steam Sales Article

The Game Room
1

Looks like Ars has updated it’s investigative Article from last year, updating sales numbers for some of the most popular Steam games during 2014.

Some interesting tidbits:

Skyrim is a sales juggernaut, adding another 3 million sales since the first article. So it’s sold over 10 million units on PC by now! Gee, I wonder if taking the effort to make your game mod friendly could benefit you as developer… hmmm…

Some of the most owned games coming out in 2014:

Unturned - 12+ million
Robocraft - 5.34 million
Heroes and Generals - 4.4 million
Dead Island Epidemic - 3.9 million
Loadout - 3.3 million
Counter Strike Nexon Zombies - 2.7 million
Warface - 2.3 million
Civ: Beyond Earth - 2.1 million

More around 1 million sellers in 2014 include: The Forest, Don’t Starve Together, Shadow of Mordor, Banished, Dark Souls II, Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Divinity, and South Park.

Some more stats:

Dark Souls II - 964,266
South Park: the Stick of Truth - 929,442
Divinity: Original Sin - 802,315
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel - 741,457
Thief - 971,028
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - 787,439
Transistor - 526,762
Wasteland 2 - 384,760
Far Cry 4 - 322,887
Octodad: Dadliest Catch - 279,272
The Evil Within - 250,533

Japanese Games doing just fiiine:

Dark Souls 2- 964,266
Ultra Street Fighter IV- 451,366 (pretty sure this includes all owners of SSFIVAE, so it’s not only sales in 2014)
METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE- 444,266
METAL SLUG 3- 443,928
FINAL FANTASY XIII- 327,959
The Evil Within- 250,533
One Way Heroics- 213,342
Valkyria Chronicles- 210,299
Dead Rising 3 Apocalypse Edition- 201,847
METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES- 192,042
Resident Evil 4- 170,403
DYNASTY WARRIORS 8: Xtreme Legends Complete Edition- 131,183
Agarest: Generations of War- 138,622
NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: Ultimate Ninja STORM Revolution- 100,416
Vanguard Princess- 135,241
Sakura Spirit- 113,264
Pro Evolution Soccer 2015- 83,849
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky- 107,516
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2- 107,178
100% Orange Juice- 87,906
FINAL FANTASY® XIII-2- 159,922
Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae- 105,488
FINAL FANTASY III- 91,964
BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger- 85,540
Hatoful Boyfriend- 85,878
The Legend of Korra™- 57,139
Killer is Dead - Nightmare Edition- 64,239
Ikaruga- 52,406
Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~- 95,007
Strider- 55,787
Astebreed- 59,844
FINAL FANTASY IV- 75,397
NEKOPARA Vol. 1- 39,896
Double Dragon: Neon- 47,672
METAL SLUG X- 42,601

Common Japanese devs, get in on this!

Some Top sales picks (from me - check out article for more) in 2014:

CS:GO - 6.4 million
Robocraft - 5.3 million
Heroes and Generals - 4.4 million
Company of Heroes 2 - 4 million
Total War: Rome II - 3.9 million
Saint’s Row IV - 2.6 million

Also, less than half of Civ beyond earth owners have played the game. Hmmm…

Also, Wasteland 2 350,000 sales. Common people, that’s RPG of 2014 along side Divinity! Buy it! Play it!

2

I imagine that the Beyond Earth are horribly skewed by the free weekend that it had. This article also seems really dodgy since stuff like Unturned barely ranks on the concurrent users steam stats page. I think Ars needs to revisit their methodology. For example, apparently Unturned peaks at 0.08% of its userbase playing concurrently. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

3

Actually Ars made sure that free weekends weren’t being counted. The numbers went up during the free weekend, but were restored once the free weekend passed.

Several of the numbers have been cross checked by Ars and the NeoGaff community as well as by people on Reddit with known numbers mentioned by the actual devs.

Not sure about Unturned’s concurrent numbers though.

4

On the list of “Most Played Older Releases (2012 or Before) on Steam”, five out of the top twenty are from Paradox:

Hearts of Iron 2 Complete
Victoria II
Hearts of Iron III
Europa Universalis III
Darkest Hour: Hearts of Iron

But where’s Crusader Kings II, arguably their greatest hit?

Also, who the frak is still playing CivCity: Rome?

5

You’re misinterpreting this category. It’s “Mean number of hours played per owner (>40k owners)” - Hearts of Iron 2/ Darkest Hour are certainly nowhere near the top 20 most played pre-2012 games. Probably not top 200. But apparently the people who do own it put a lot of hours into it.

Their methodologies here are weird and none of these numbers look right. See steamcharts for a decent actual look into what’s being played. They seem to count some F2P games and not others - and when it comes to ownership those should either be listed separately or require that something actually be bought to count. These charts give the impression that all sorts of F2P crap dominates the steam played charts, but they don’t. I doubt those numbers even then. For example, Dead Island Epidemic has an average player count somewhere in the range of 800, but we’re supposed to believe that 4 million people have played it?

As someone who keeps an eye on the pulse of what’s popular on steam fairly regularly, these lists would give a grossly distorted view of what’s actually being played on steam. I’d hate for people to think the most popular game on PC is some minecraft+zombies bullshit.