Steam has revealed its best games of 2023 according to several metrics.
Posted by the storefront online, the list allows players to sort by Top Sellers, New Releases, Most Played, Early Access Graduates, Steam Deck, Controller Friendly, and Top VR. As each category has a hundred entries, I’m not going to dive into all of them right now, but I do want to give you some highlights to head off the screams of clickbait that will come from the comments if I don’t.
Related: Best VR Games of 2023
In terms of Top Sellers, the games listed there — which are at the Platinum tier — are PUBG Battlegrounds, Lost Ark, Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3, Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, Starfield, Sons of the Forest, Hogwarts Legacy, Destiny 2, DOTA 2, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
The Most Played category tells a similar story. As measured by “peak concurrent players,” the biggest games of the year on Steam were Goose Goose Duck, Apex Legends, DOTA 2, Lost Ark, Hogwarts Legacy, Baldur’s Gate 3, PUBG Battlegrounds, Starfield, Counter-Strike 2, Destiny 2, and Sons of the Forest, with all of those breaking the 300,000 mark.
None of that feels specifically surprising, as those are some of the biggest names from this year, and many of those same games also appear in the New Releases category as among the highest earning. Many of the games on those lists were among the nominees and winners at this year’s The Game Awards, and a lot are on sale now as part of Steam’s Winter Sale, which goes until Jan. 4.
Launched in 2003 by Half-Life maker Valve, Steam is one of the biggest marketplaces around for buying video games. For the past few years, the company has released lists like the ones above, though often with some variations in the categories.
