Dec 28, 2018

Steam News - Alden

Yesterday we revealed the top-selling and top-played games of 2018 across all of Steam. In building those year-end lists, we also became curious as to which games were most popular with different kinds of controllers. We know from past analysis, that a lot of players on Steam have used a controller of some kind to play a game (36.7 Million players at last count). And we know that not every game works equally as well with each model of controller, so we wanted to put together some guides to help find the games that you might enjoy most with the particular kind of controller that you have.

With that in mind, we've put together a set of pages to highlight the most popular games being played with each of the most common controller models: Top Games played with Xbox controllers (including a huge range of 3rd party controllers that are very similar), Top games played with PlayStation controllers, Top games played with Steam Controllers, and finally Top Games Played With Nintendo Switch Pro controllers.

Each page is broken down into three sections:

Top New Releases

This page highlights the 150 top-selling games released in 2018, split out by their month of release. To build this list, we looked at a combination of first-week revenue and overall revenue in 2018 to create a list of games that had achieved a sizable level of commercial success, regardless of when during the year each title released.

We find it pretty interesting how much variation there is from month to month. For example, December is a busy month and a lot of activity to compete with, so it's understandable that it might be a less desirable month to release in. But April only had 5 releases that made our list and July only had 6, whereas February was the busiest month with 22 popular releases.

Here's the list of Top Selling New Releases of 2018!

Top Selling VR Titles

This year again saw over 1,000 new releases with Virtual Reality support, with almost all of those (over 900) being VR-only experiences. Top VR sellers included new releases such as Beat Saber, Blade & Sorcery, Budget Cuts, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR, plus some of last-year's top hits including Fallout 4 VR and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. There were even some classics appearing in top for the third year in a row, such as RAW DATA and Arizona Sunshine.

Our list this year highlights the leading VR titles by sharing the 100 top selling VR titles of 2018, plus a new section on the page for the top 20 VR releases of 2018.

Here's the list of Top Selling VR Titles of 2018!

Top Early Access Grads

This year's batch of notable titles launching through Steam Early Access includes the hugely popular games Raft and SCUM, and the VR-only experience Beat Saber. Meanwhile many popular titles such as DayZ, The Forest, and RimWorld made their transition from Early Access to full release in 2018.

We wanted to recognize the games that have worked hard to build happy communities and make the transition from Early Access to full release this year. So, we've put together a list of the top 50 games that transitioned out of Early Access to full release during 2018, as measured by revenue earned during 2018 (during Early Access and after full release).

Here's the list of Top Early Access Grads of 2018!

Most Played Games

The Most Played Games list contains games that had more than 15,000 simultaneous players at some point during the year. To fully recognize the games that have built a significant community and player base, we've excluded a number of games that only had short-term spikes in player count due to running giveaways.

Here's the list of Most Played Games of 2018!

Notes:

We don't disclose specific revenue for the lists, but top sellers are broken into four categories in order to give you an idea of how they placed:

Platinum: 1st - 12th Top Seller
Gold: 13th - 24th Top Seller
Silver: 25th - 40th Top Seller
Bronze: 41st - 100th Top Seller

Thanks for reading, and for another great year on Steam! We're constantly surprised by the amazing new games that seem to come out of nowhere, delight their audiences and end up on these lists (and in our Steam libraries) by year-end.

Also, don't forget to check out the Steam Winter Sale, on now through January 3rd. Many of the titles in the lists above are on great discounts, and these lists are a great way to see which games were resonating the most with players this year.

-The Steam Team

Dec 18, 2018

Announcing The Steam Awards 2018 Nominees

Steam News - molly

The Steam Community has spoken, and we are proud to announce the finalists for The Steam Awards 2018 -- but we still need your help choosing the winners!

Voting will open on December 20th, at the start of the 12th annual Steam Winter Sale. Vote in each of our 8 categories to share your top Steam games and developers from 2018 and obtain this year’s set of trading cards.

Voting closes January 3rd and winners will be announced early February 2019. Good luck to all of our nominees!

Nominees for Game of the Year

PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
HITMAN™ 2
Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Nominees for VR Game of the Year

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR
VRChat
Beat Saber
Fallout 4 VR
SUPERHOT VR

Nominees for Labor of Love

Dota 2
Grand Theft Auto V
No Man's Sky
Path of Exile
Stardew Valley

Nominees for Best Environment

The Witcher® 3: Wild Hunt
Subnautica
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Far Cry 5
DARK SOULS™ III

Nominees for Better with Friends

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six® Siege
PAYDAY 2
Dead by Daylight
Overcooked! 2

Nominees for Best Alternate History

Wolfeinstein II: The New Colossus
Assassin's Creed® Odyssey
Hearts of Iron IV
Sid Meier's Civilization® VI
Fallout 4

Nominees for Most Fun with a Machine

Euro Truck Simulator 2
Rocket League
NieR:Automata
Factorio
Space Engineers

Nominees for Best Developer

CD PROJEKT RED
Ubisoft
Bethesda
Rockstar Games
Digital Extremes Ltd.
Square Enix
Capcom
Paradox Interactive
BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment
Klei

Notes on Best Developer category:

"Best Developer” proved to be a highly-contested category with a lot of close calls among the top nominees. As a result, we expanded the set of nominees to 10. In addition, we’ve excluded ourselves from this category. We appreciate the love you’ve shown us, but we want to honor the other awesome developers on Steam, so we have excluded Valve from the final tally.

Oct 11, 2018

Improved Language Support for Spanish and Adding Vietnamese

Steam News - Unicorn Princess

We wanted to give you a heads up about some exciting language options coming to Steam.

Starting today, we are adding two new languages (Vietnamese and Latin American Spanish) to the list of 26 languages officially supported by Steam. This means the Steam desktop client, the Steam store, and the Steam Community, are all translated to make it easier for Vietnamese or Latin American Spanish speakers to interact with Steam, find games, and chat with friends. It also means that game developers can now provide translations of their game in those languages through Steam.

Why Vietnamese?

Vietnamese is the sole national language of the country Vietnam, but is also widely used in other countries, including the United States, Australia, and France. There are over 75 million Vietnamese speakers worldwide. In November of 2017, we added Steam support for the national currency of Vietnam, the Vietnamese Dong, along with a number of payment methods that make it easier for players in Vietnam to make purchases on Steam. While supporting payments methods and currencies is important for making Steam accessible to global audiences, we realized our mistake in not also supporting the national language too so that players can more easily find their way around Steam and be able to get games in their native language, when available.

Why Latin American Spanish?

In the past, Steam has only supported a single definition of Spanish-language. But our customers and game developers have been reminding us of the stylistic differences among Spanish spoken in different locales, and requested that Steam support that difference. As a result, we now have a definition of both Castilian (European) Spanish and Latin American (LatAm) Spanish, translating the Steam desktop client, store, and community into both variants of Spanish.

As a practical example, this is how we already treat Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, where customers can choose one, the other, or both for their language preferences, and game developers can indicate whichever variants their game supports.

Changing Your Language Preferences in Steam

Whether your native language is Vietnamese, Castilian Spanish, or any of the 26 other languages supported by Steam, you can specify your language preferences in the Steam desktop client by clicking "Steam>settings>interface".

Additionally, you can specify more than one language within the Steam store to help you find more games available in languages you may speak. For example, you may want to run Steam in Vietnamese, but you also speak English and want to make sure you can find games that are available with English language audio. You can visit your store preferences to select multiple languages for games that you wish to discover in the Steam store.

FAQ for Game Developers

Language support can be pretty important for the enjoyment of games. If you are making a game on Steam, here are some questions we thought you might have and some answers. Of course if you have additional question, please let us know through the Steamworks contact form.

Q: What do I need to do if my game already supports Spanish?
A: If you want to add another language support option, you can provide Spanish support in both Castilian and Latin American varieties. If you don’t plan to add additional support, that’s OK: Steam will assume that your existing Spanish language content is Castilian and automatically provide that content to customers that have indicated either Castilian or Latin American Spanish. If your existing translation is actually Latin American Spanish, you can update your definition within Steamworks by visiting your app landing page and clicking "Edit Steamworks Settings" and selecting "Depots" from the "SteamPipe" drop-down.

For more information on translating your game into different languages, and a list of supported languages, please see https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/localization

Q: What if my game doesn’t support Spanish at all?
A: That’s okay, and you don’t need to make any changes. But just so you know: nearly 2 million of our 45 million daily active users view the store in Spanish, and platform revenue in Latin America increased 35% over the previous year… so now might be a good time to consider adding support!

Q: What’s the difference, anyway? Why does this matter?
A: There are some substantial differences in vocabulary and colloquial choices between these two varieties of Spanish. By supporting the difference on the Steam store and UI, we can make it more welcoming and easy to use. By supporting the difference in your game, you can provide the best possible experience to any customers who want to play your game in Spanish. Historically, customer improvements to localization and regional support have helped grow the overall pie of platform opportunity for developers, and we think this will be one more improvement for people who play and make PC games.

Q: Do I get any benefit if my game supports additional languages on Steam?
A: Definitely! In addition to making your game more accessible to more customers, language preference is one of the things the store takes into account when making recommendations. That means a customer is more likely to see your game in the store if it supports the language preferences the customer selected. For example, Vietnamese is the fifth most spoken language in the United States, at around 1.5 million speakers.

Q: Where can I learn more about adding language support?
A: We’re so glad you asked! The documentation here provides a rundown on localization, and some best practices and advice. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/localization

Sep 25, 2018

Controller Gaming on PC

Steam News - Ian

Controller compatibility in PC games used to be managed only by the individual game developers, meaning a game supported a predetermined set of hardware and players selected from these prescribed input options. In 2015 we began an experiment to find out what happens when the community is less constrained. We shipped tools that allow Steam users to map controls from various devices (e.g. Steam Controller, PlayStation controllers, Xbox controllers) to any combination of inputs that the title understands (e.g. keyboard keys, mouse movement, controller presses). Additionally, we created a system to share and modify these controller configurations so the best input schemes boil up to the top, allowing the cumulative efforts of the community to benefit us all. These two features, remapping and sharing, served as the foundation of what we now call Steam Input.

Three years later, the Steam Input experiment is starting to bear interesting results. By supporting so many controller types we've learned about which controllers are being used on the platform and by accommodating customization we've learned how players prefer to interact with different genres. Today we'll share figures on which controllers have been connected to Steam, how controllers are being used, and what happens when a new controller is released on the platform. We'll also discuss the Steam Controller and how hardware choices set it apart from other controller types.

Controllers on Steam

The first thing that jumps out in the data is that a lot of Steam players have a controller. Since 2015, over 30 million players have registered at least one controller and over 15 million of those players have registered more than one. Between accounts with multiple controllers and controllers that have been registered to multiple accounts, we find that a total of 60 million device-account pairs have been connected to Steam. The charts below provide a breakdown by controller type.

Console controllers make up the bulk of devices, but the remaining 8% are significant, totaling nearly 5 million controllers. This is a group that consists of Steam Controllers, PC gamepads, Nintendo controllers, and fightsticks (and don't forget the 783 dancepads). This is a large, eclectic set of input devices that, in some cases, take quite a bit of user initiative to even connect to a PC. There is a lot to unpack in these numbers, but by combining this with playtime data we arrive at a few interesting conclusions.

Xbox controllers are the most common PC controller

Xbox controllers are essentially the default controller for PC games, and this fact is apparent in the controllers stats. Nearly 40 million Xbox 360 and Xbox One controllers have been connected to Steam, representing 64% of all controllers. How, exactly, did they become the default? A decade ago, Microsoft made a concerted effort to drive adoption of XInput, the underlying protocol, and that work resulted in widespread support by game developers. Because built-in support is overwhelmingly XInput support, an Xbox controller is a good bet to seamlessly play many different titles.

PS4 controllers are surprisingly abundant

PlayStation 4 is an extremely popular console with a great controller. The reason we're surprised by 12 million is, historically, the PS4 controller has not been treated like a PC gaming controller. Built-in support is uncommon, so players turn to software that translates their PS4 controller input into Xbox controller input. This has a few drawbacks. For example, a game may prompt you to 'press Y to jump', when, in reality, you should be pressing the triangle button. These mental translations can be a deal-breaker for certain PS4 controller users, and we see evidence that this is occurring in the monthly playtime data.

Notice that Xbox One engagement is nearly twice that of the PS4. It's not clear how much of that difference can be explained by the user experience, but it stands to reason that the gap would be smaller if more titles had seamless support. One potential solution is full Steam Input integration on the game side, which includes a feature that enables in-game hints based on controller type. We'll discuss more of these advanced Steam Input features in a later post, for today we'll leave it at: there is a large, untapped, community of PS4 controller users on Steam.

The Switch Pro controller is pretty popular for a new device

The Switch Pro controller arrived in 2017 and players immediately began attaching them to their PCs. At the time, support was mostly limited to basic Steam Input remapping; meaning the UI did not match the physical device and features like motion control and rumble were not available. In May 2018, a Steam update enabled the full feature set of the device, added matching artwork in the UI, and improved the overall experience. The result was an acceleration in Switch Pro controller registrations, noticeable in the graph below, and a rise to the 7th most popular controller type on Steam.

Steam Controllers are played with a diverse set of games

With the Steam Controller we set out to make a device compatible with your whole library, including mouse-driven games. The unique combination of trackpad and gyro inputs make for better precision pointing and aiming controls than a typical thumb stick and help bridge the gap between controller and non-controller titles. To date, we have sold 1.3 million Steam Controllers, but it's how they're being used that is most interesting to us. The Steam Controller community plays a more diverse selection of games than other controller types, interacting with nearly twice the total number of titles compared to the next closest device. Additionally, many of these are titles without built-in controller support. We're happy to see our customers engaging with all kinds of games and will continue to improve the Steam Controller experience for our existing and future users.

What's Next?

Steam has a large and diverse collection of controllers on the platform, a fact that is at odds with the approach of built-in, static controller support. Sure, supporting Xbox controllers will capture 64% of Steam users, but what about the other 22 million devices? What’s more, future controller types may include input modalities that didn’t exist, or weren’t popular, at the time of the game’s release. For example, motion controls are relatively new, but Steam Input has allowed the community to experiment with it in older titles. In several cases they’ve found motion control configurations that they believe are superior to the ones we’ve all been using for years.

By supporting over 200 controller models, full Steam Input integration has the additional benefit of creating a uniform experience across devices. And, because it is a part of Steam, future Steam Client updates will extend support to new controllers without any effort from the developer. In a follow-up post we will discuss these features of Steam Input, and others, to demonstrate how they serve the wide-ranging population of controller users on Steam.