No new indie millionaries this week: we’re still looking at the consequences of the Steam Summer Sale, so the weekly list of best-sellers is entirely devoid of new releases. Hordes of people who’d sat on the fence about 2015’s big games jumped on the discounts, and that means many familiar names. Of course, you discerning bunch went and bought all the games we recommended instead, didn’t you?
[Update: Okay! So, gambling site CSGOLotto was blocked by an overzealous volunteer moderator rather than by high order from Valve, another community mod has explained, and the warning is now removed. However! Since this all kicked off, a YouTuber with almost half a million subscribers has admitted he was paid in valuable skins for undisclosed promotional videos faking big wins in a different weapon skin lottery. Ooh there’s a lot of shady business going on all right.]
Let’s skip to the takeaway message then we can fill in the details: never gamble with your imaginary guns if you’re not prepared to lose everything or be made to look like a mug. Okay, so! Valve do not endorse the sites which use Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site] weapon skins as a currency for gambling but they do at least mostly tolerate them. This week, however, they have taken the rare step of warning against one particular skin lottery after it was discovered that famous YouTubers who made videos praising it were the site’s owners.
A shorter than usual weekly Steam best-sellers chart this week, primarily because almost everything is explained simply by the words “Steam Summer sale”, but partly because I’ve already spent a chunk of today compiling a big list of Sale recommendations to help our beloved readers’ purchasin’ decisions. You can have a pithy and/or explantory line about each game next week, promise. Meantime: these are the ten best-selling games on Steam last week. Expect next week’s to look wildly different, thanks to the ongoing and regularly changing sale. … [visit site to read more]
Like a man dancing to Belle & Sebastian, last week’s best-selling Steam games saw some shaking at the top but not a lot of movement below. IS YOUR FAVOURITE GAME HERE AND WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT YOU AS A PERSON IF IT’S NOT? … [visit site to read more]
I am genuinely surprised by which game sold best on Steam last week (previous weeks here, btw). PC gaming remains beautifully unpredictable, doesn’t it?
The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site] blog has announced the winners of the recent Polycount weapon finish contest. I don’t think we usually cover that side of things and I’m quite uncomfortable talking about guns with any level of excitement, but I liked the colour palette of the winning design so I decided to dig a bit deeper to see how the process works and how the designs develop. The theme was 70s and 80s science-fiction.
It’s yer regular round-up of what shifted the most copies on Steam over the previous week. Last week, Total Warhammer was dark master of all it surveyed, but a bug-eyed old friend has displaced it after just one week…
Here’s yer weekly top ten Steam best-sellers. That being what most tore up the charts last week. Is DOOM still king? What happens to Total Warhammer now it’s actually released? And what in the name of all that’s holy is YouTubers Life? … [visit site to read more]
Phew: we have nine different names in the top ten sellers on Steam last week, rather than the recent trend for various pre-orders and season passes splitting the vote excessively. Question is, has Joe/Jo Public responded as rapturously to DOOM as Ian/Iana Critic has?
I say top ten, but there are actually only seven different games in the past week’s Steam charts, once pre-orders and deluxe editions are filtered out. It seems like a lifetime ago that Stardew Valley and Factorio were doing a little indie rampage around the charts, as Steam’s best-sellers have now very much reverted to big-brand type. Also: pre-ordering sure doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon, no matter how unwise it might seem. … [visit site to read more]