We're continuing our new monthly series with a look at the top games released on Steam during the month of June. As with last month's post, this list looks at all games released during the month and grabs the top 20 by revenue earned in the first two weeks following release.

About half of this month’s top releases come from teams releasing their very first game on Steam. Some of these teams have been making games for a while on consoles or for mobile markets, while others are brand-new teams working together for the first time. Barotrauma, Cooking Sim, SpaceEngine, Bloodstained, MyFriendPedro, Super Neptunia, Hardcore Mecha, Nine Trials, Wasteland Survival, Ring of Elysium, and Lords Mobile are all Steam firsts from these developers.

Meanwhile, a total of seven of the top releases either entered or left Early Access in the month of June, continuing to demonstrate a strong interest in a live model of development that incorporates player feedback.

A number of these games found success with niche audience groups, so it’s great to see that those groups are big enough and engaged enough to drive these games into the top 20. Pro Cycling Manager 2019 is a game that traditionally sells to players in Western Europe (France in particular), and is likely propelled by the interest in the Tour De France kicking off just days after release of the game. Meanwhile, F1 Racing’s success would indicate a lot of players are following the latest season of F1 racing and probably have racing wheels hooked up to their PCs. We’re also pleased to see an educational exploration game like SpaceEngine make the list because we all love space, right?

Here is this month's list of top new releases ordered by release date (we've put this list on a handy store page too):


Trover Saves the Universe - 3D platformer action in a bizarre comedy universe from the co-creator of Rick and Morty. Released June 4th.


Barotrauma - Just arrived into Early Access - 2D survival on a submarine plunging deep below the surface of a frozen ocean. Released June 5th.


Hell Let Loose - Just arrived into Early Access - WWII FPS with 100 player battles and a strategic meta game including a dynamically shifting front line and resource management. Released June 6th.


Cooking Simulator - Play in sandbox mode or take on a career in this cooking simulator with full physics and realistic ingredients. Released June 6th.


OCTOPATH TRAVELER - Eight unique and unforgettable story paths and characters with retro JRPG style and a fully developed 3D world. Released June 7th.


コイカツ / Koikatsu Party - Endless customization options and roleplaying with variety of anime companions. Note: This game is marked as 'adult only' and requires you to be signed in to view. Released June 10th.


SpaceEngine - Just arrived into Early Access - A fully science-based & photorealistic 3D planetarium that models the entire known universe, with procedural generation of the unknown. Released June 11th.


They Are Billions - Coming out of Early Access - Build and survive in this steampunk strategy game set on a post-apocalyptic planet under siege. Released June 18th.


Police Simulator: Patrol Duty - From routine traffic stops to fugitive pursuits - simulate the life of a US police officer in this open world crime simulator. Released June 18th.


Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - An exploration-focused, side-scrolling action RPG by Koji Igarashi of Castlevania fame. Released June 18th.


AMID EVIL - A retro fast-paced FPS from the producers of Dusk and creators of Return of the Triad. Released June 20th.


Steel Division 2 - Coming out of Early Access - A historically-accurate strategy game set on the Eastern Front of WWII - Strategic campaigns, real-time battles and a unique deck building system. Released June 20th.


My Friend Pedro - A violent ballet about friendship, imagination, and one man’s struggle to obliterate anyone in his path at the behest of a sentient banana. Released June 20th.


Muse Dash - Dance and parkour your way through to 30 original songs in this fast paced rhythm game with full Japanese voiceover. Released June 20th.


Super Neptunia RPG - A JRPG adventure with a refreshing 2D twist on the classic Neptunia series. Released June 20th.


Ring of Elysium - Coming out of Early Access - A free-to-play game with a unique take on battle royales set in an apocalyptic world with natural disasters, player abilities and grappling hooks. Released June 24th.


HARDCORE MECHA - Start a campaign or test your multiplayer skills in this 2D platformer with intense mecha combat. Released June 26th.


F1 2019 - The official game of F1 racing, featuring all the teams, drivers and circuits from the 2019 and 2018 seasons. Released June 27th.


Pro Cycling Manager 2019 - Manage your own team of professional cyclists and claim victory in over 200 races around the world. Released June 27th.


九劫曲:诅咒之地 NINE TRIALS - Just arrived into Early Access - Play as an Immortal in this refreshed battle royale experience with melee combat and RPG elements. Released June 28th.

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The above list is generated by looking at revenue as one measure of popularity. But we know that this measure doesn’t fully capture the popularity of free games that many players may be enjoying but that don’t generate revenue the same way as the kinds of traditional paid games listed above. So this month, we’re also adding a list of the top five free games released in June, measured (and ranked here) by peak player count within the first two weeks following release.

This month, Ring of Elysium makes both lists by establishing a solid player base during Early Access and throughout launch.


Dota Underlords - Hire a crew and destroy your rivals in this new strategy battler set in the world of Dota. Released June 20th.


Ring of Elysium - Coming out of Early Access - A unique take on battle royales set in an apocalyptic world with natural disasters, player abilities and grappling hooks. Released June 24th.


Black Squad - Coming out of Early Access - Skill and strategy reign supreme in this military based FPS with a variety of game modes and unlockable weapons. Released June 26th.


Lords Mobile - Clash with 280 million other players on both mobile and Steam in a world of real-time strategy and chaos. Released June 3rd.


Wasteland Survival - Develop your own base and craft specialized supplies in this isometric post-apocalyptic survival game. Released June 3rd.

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As we were building the above lists, we got curious about what popular games came out in previous years. So we looked back to a year ago in June 2018, and found the top 5 releases (in order of release date) were
Vampyr, Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr, Jurassic World Evolution, Crash Bandicoot™ N. Sane Trilogy, The Crew 2.

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If you missed past Top New Releases lists, here are the links to The Top Releases of April and The Top Releases of May.

Cheers!
-The Steam Team

Today we're introducing a new interactive recommender as one of the experimental features in Steam Labs. Check it out at: https://store.steampowered.com/recommender/



One of Steam's strengths is its massive catalog of great games from developers large and small, spanning almost every genre. With so much stuff to choose from, we've heard from users that you'd like better tools to help you find games you'll enjoy. While existing store features like tag-based searching can work well, we think we can do better by bringing to bear the power of machine learning to give players personalized recommendations based on their own individual play patterns. Combine that with real-time controls to adjust your results, and the recommender becomes a fun and powerful tool for exploring Steam and connecting you with games you'll love.

Underlying this new recommender is a neural-network model that is trained to recommend games based on a user's playtime history, along with other salient data. We train the model based on data from many millions of Steam users and many billions of play sessions, giving us robust results that capture the nuances of different play patterns and covers our catalog. The model is parameterized so that we can restrict output to games released within a specified time-window, and can be adjusted to prefer games a higher or lower underlying popularity. These parameters are exposed to the user, allowing you to select whether to see only recent releases in the results, or go all the way back to include games released a decade ago. Similarly, you can choose whether to see mainstream hits, or deep cuts from the catalog. Regardless of the settings of the sliders, the results will always be personalized and relevant to the individual user.

Unlike more traditional approaches, we don't explicitly feed our model information about the games. Instead, the model learns about the games for itself during the training process. In fact, the only information about a game that gets explicitly fed into the process is the release date, enabling us to do time-windowing for the release-date slider. It turns out that using release date as part of the model training process yields better quality results than simply applying it as filter on the output.

Notably, we do not use information about tags or review scores when creating the model. This means reviews or tags alone simply cannot affect results. The model infers properties of games by learning what users do, not by looking at other extrinsic data.

We do allow users to filter the final results by tag, so they can narrow down to the kind of game they're in the mood for at that time, but this isn't part of underlying model.

One direction is to gather every single piece of information about a game, and then make guesses about what games are similar, and then recommend those “similar” games. But that allows for all sorts of weird distortions— just because you play a lot of Beat Saber, doesn’t mean we should only ever recommend you VR rhythm games. This model takes a different approach. It disregards most of the usual data about a game, like genre or price point. Instead, it looks at what games you play and what games other people play, then makes informed suggestions based on the decisions of other people playing games on Steam. The idea is that if players with broadly similar play habits to you also tend to play another game you haven't tried yet, then that game is likely to be a good recommendation for you.

We chose “popularity” just because there might not be a more accurate term, but you could also think of it as "mainstream-ness". Just like books or music or movies, there’s a huge range of what people are looking for. One person wants to know the newest and most popular games around, and the next person wants the opposite: games that are interesting and relevant but not necessarily well-known. We think this tool will be helpful to those on both ends of that spectrum. We've found that, especially for people who play a lot of games, digging into the "niche" end of the range can be a very effective way to find hidden gems.

Rather than introducing a big change to the way customized recommendations are determined on Steam, we’re introducing this new recommender as an experiment customers can seek out and try. This will help us get better usage data while avoiding any sudden shifts that we know can be frustrating for customers and developers who are accustomed to Steam. Should the interactive recommender or related experiments prove useful, we’ll share an update before rolling out any big changes to the way Steam recommends titles to people. The data driving Popular, New, and Trending is different from that of the Discovery Queue, this new recommender, and so on. We view this new interactive recommender as one discovery element among many, and look forward to introducing more ways to connect customers with interesting content and developers.

New games in a system such as this one have a chicken-and-egg effect known as the "cold start" problem. The model can't recommend games that don't have players yet, because it has no data about them. It can react quite quickly, and when re-trained it picks up on new releases with just a few days of data. That said, it can't fill the role played by the Discovery Queue in surfacing brand new content, and so we view this tool to be additive to existing mechanisms rather than a replacement for them.

The recommender knows that there are great short-form games you can finish in an hour, and those you'll play for thousands. Your playtime data is normalized to reflect the distribution of playtime in each game, ensuring that all games are on an equal footing.

Sometimes, computer-driven discovery makes creators focus on optimizing for "The Algorithm" rather than customers. You might ask, how is this any different? We designed the recommender to be driven by what players do, not by extrinsic elements like tags or reviews. The best way for a developer to optimize for this model is to make a game that people enjoy playing. While it's important to supply users with useful information about your game on its store page, you shouldn't agonize about whether tags or other metadata will affect how a recommendations model sees your game.

We want to hear feedback from both customers and developers, so, check out the The Interactive Recommender and join the discussions to let us know what you think. As we gather data about the recommender's usefulness, we'll share how things are going.

We designed the new recommender as a tool for customers to use, and ideally it will also help developers. Developers can see how many page visits the recommender is generating directly in the existing “Traffic Breakdown” page for each game, though note that this experiment might not generate much traffic relative to the rest of Steam. If developers have questions or feedback, you may use the “Support” button at the top of any Steamworks web page to quickly get a hold of us.


-The Steam Team

Behind the scenes at Steam, we create many experimental features with codenames like The Peabody Recommender and Organize Your Steam Library Using Morse Code. For the first time, we're giving these works-in-progress a home called Steam Labs, where you can interact with them, tell us whether you think they're worth pursuing further, and if so, share your thoughts on how they should evolve.

We've selected three initial experiments to share as we launch the Labs. Each of these is designed to help people find the games they'll love.

Micro Trailers are lovingly-generated six-second game trailers, arranged on a page so you can digest them all at a glance. Check out our new micro trailer collections for adventure games, RPGs, builders, and more.

The Interactive Recommender looks at your top-played games and uses machine learning to recommend other titles it thinks you'll love. Find old classics by directing it toward popular titles released in the past ten years, or discover that diamond-in-the-rough by zeroing in on niche games launched in the past six months.

The Automated Show is a half-hour video featuring the latest Steam launches. Leave it on a second monitor while you work, or glue your eyeballs to it and let hundreds of games wash over you.

So pop on your lab coat, try the experiments, and then share your feedback to help shape the future of Steam.

To follow future news and additions to Steam Labs, join the Steam Labs Community Group, where we'll share announcements and updates.

Cheers!
-The Steam Team

Congratulations to our Day 4 winning teams, Tortoise, Hare and Pig!

Today at the Indie Motor Speedway, we have some brief special announcements to make.

The Grand Prix Badge is no longer infinitely upgradable. If you've already upgraded your badge beyond level 2000, you are in luck! All upgrades will be honored. Badges obtained through exploits have already been removed.

Additionally, in an effort to balance team sizes for the event, we are rolling out a new random drop: Switch Teams. Once received, players will find it below the Attack buttons on their dash. Clicking this button will randomly re-assign you to a different team while also granting you 1000 more max points so you can complete quests and claim achievements for your new team. No need to use it, though if you are interested in making a switch you will need to act soon, as this one-time offer will expire within 48 hours of receiving it.



Best of luck to each of the drivers and teams, from all of us on the Steam Team, here on Day 5 and throughout the remainder of the Grand Prix!

Congrats to the winners at Magic Mountain on Day 3, and a special welcome to the podium to Pig... in a Blanket! Corgi would appear to be unstoppable, but the Grand Prix can still be taken by any of the teams.

The first few days of the Grand Prix have been dynamic and dramatic, to the point that some of you have started to wonder what's going on under the hood. We want to assure you that we are not manually intervening in the outcome of a given day's race. Each team's progress is fueled by its active number of players and the points and boosts they contribute.

Racers, we’ve heard your feedback – you want to race! We have added more ways to participate in the Grand Prix for free. Introducing: Qualifier Tasks. Now in addition to grabbing deals in the Summer Sale, players may join the races for free by first completing one or more of these objectives. Each completed task increases a driver's max points by 500, enabling you to complete Grand Prix Quests and claim Achievements.



Also, you know those Achievement points we made you throw away rather than claim? Those are now back in the hopper, ready for claiming. Additionally, whenever you claim Achievement points, any available beyond your current max points will now be saved. You can increase your max points and then return to claim them at any time throughout the Grand Prix races.

We've also tried to clarify the team positions with some changes to the track – let us know what you think!

Lastly, we've heard you on the Grand Prix Badge. Man that thing is hefty! It is awarding *signficantly* more XP than intended. We'll be fixing this bug soon, lightening the value of the badge. While this may be dissappointing in the short term, we want to respect the value of past and future badges earned and feel this correction is the fairest measure we can take to make things right. If you no longer love your Grand Prix Badge, you will be able to exchange it at the Pit Stop for the number of of tokens you've spent on it.

EDIT: Thanks everyone for your feedback. We appreciate hearing from all of you. We are glad everyone is enjoying earning and leveling up the Grand Prix badge. We are re-evaluating options on handling it.

Best of luck to all the teams in the Rainbow Ring during Day 4!

We're continuing our new monthly series with a look at the top games released on Steam during the month of May. As with last month's post, this list looks at all games released during the month and grabs the top 20 by revenue earned in the first two weeks following release.

In this list, there really is something for every kind of player. From narrative single-player games to open world first-person shooters. Deep real-time strategy games to realistic simulation games. Pixely RPGs to Super-high-definition action games. Family-friendly racing games to dark horror experiences.

Here is this month's list of top new releases ordered by release date (we've put this list on a handy store page too):

• Rise of Industry - a single-player, strategic, tycoon game with a living, breathing, and procedurally generated world set in the 1930s. released May 2, 2019.
  
• Swag and Sorcery - a very pixely pingle-player RPG, released May 9, 2019
  
• Yakuza Kiwami 2 - a high-def update to the classic story-driven beat 'em up with full controller support, released May 9, 2019
  
• A Plague Tale: Innocence, a single-player story rich adventure with full controller support, released May 14, 2019
  
• RAGE 2- a post-apocalyptic open world shooter, released May 14, 2019
  
• Beat Saber - a VR-only music rhythm game, released on May 21, 2019 after 12 months in Early Access.
  
• Team Sonic Racing™ - a cute, fast-paced arcade racing featuring Sonic and friends, released May 21, 2019
  
• BATTALION 1944: a realistic WWII multiplayer shooter, released May 23, 2019.
  
• Total War: THREE KINGDOMS - a turn-based empire-building and strategy game with stunning real-time battles, released May 23, 2019.
  
• Minion Masters - a free to play fast-paced strategic card game, with 1v1 or 2v2 battles. Transitioned out of Early Access on May 24, 2019.
  
• XERA: Survival - a multiplayer open world looter shooter, featuring a global gear stash accessible from any server. Launched in Early access on May 24, 2019
  
• FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S VR: HELP WANTED - a VR-only first-person survival horror game, released May 28, 2019.
  
• Layers of Fear 2 - a psychological horror game filled with unique puzzles, released May 28, 2019.
  
• SpellForce 3: Soul Harvest - a standalone expansion to the RTS/RPG hit SpellForce 3, released May 28, 2019.
  
• Void Bastards - a stylized action strategy game with loot scavenging and full controller support, released May 28, 2019.
  
• Assetto Corsa Competizione - the official Blancpain GT Series racing game, rendered with realistic simulation and including official drivers, teams, cars and circuits. Transitioned out of Early Access on May 29, 2019
  
• Conan Unconquered - a real-time survival strategy game set in the world of Conan the Barbarian, released May 29, 2019.
  
• Conqueror's Blade - a free to play, medieval multiplayer action strategy game. Transitioned out of Early Access May 30.
  
• Deathgarden: BLOODHARVEST - a dark, dystopian, multiplayer survival game in which a ruthless hunter tracks and guns down scavengers. Launched in Early Access on May 30, 2019.
  
• Warhammer: Chaosbane - a hack-and-slash set in the Warhammer Fantasy world. Features solo, co-op, or multiplayer and full controller support. Released May 31, 2019.

The above list is generated by looking at revenue as one measure of popularity. But we know that this measure doesn’t fully capture the popularity of free games that many players may be enjoying but that don’t generate revenue the same way as the kinds of traditional paid games listed above. So this month, we’re also adding a list of the top five free games released in May, measured (and ranked here) by peak player count within the first two weeks following release.

• Conqueror's Blade - a medieval multiplayer action strategy game.
  
• Splitgate: Arena Warfare – a multiplayer first-person-shooter that uses player-controlled portals to create a new dimension of arena combat.
  
• Minion Masters - a free to play fast-paced strategic card game, with 1v1 or 2v2 battles.
  
• Eden Rising – a solo or multiplayer open-world tower defense game.
  
• Never Split the Party – a multiplayer social rogue-like that depends on cooperative adventuring.

As we were building the above lists, we got curious about what popular games came out in previous years. So we looked back to a year ago in May 2018, and found the top 5 releases (in order of release date) were Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, Conan Exiles, Raft, and DARK SOULS™: REMASTERED.

Cheers!
-The Steam Team

We’ve heard your feedback about the complexity of the Steam Grand Prix event. We designed something pretty complicated with a whole bunch of numbers and rules and recognize we should’ve been more clear. We want to apologize for the confusion that this has caused, and also apologize for the broken mechanics that have led to an unbalanced event.

Based on your feedback, we’ve made some updates to the game, which should make it more fun to play:

• We've made improvements to the Driver's Dash and Manual, to help clarify how to play.
  
  
• We’ve made some back-end changes to help mitigate some of the snowball effects we’ve seen that have led to Team Corgi running away with the first two days of the races despite their tiny legs.
  
  
• We’ve changed some code to help deal with the imbalanced team sizes across the board.
  
  
• We've added a new random drop drivers can receive upon boosting called STEAL BOOSTS. If another team is way ahead, use this attack against them to help close the gap by stealing their boosts for your own team.

To clarify one point: if your team makes it to the podium and you are randomly chosen to win something off your Steam Wishlist, then we’ll grant you the top item. Just move your favorite item to the top of your wishlist and you should be good to go. There's no need to remove other items from your wishlist -- keep them there so you'll be notified when those items release or go on sale.



We’re hoping some of these changes will help make the event more clear and enjoyable. We’ll keep an eye on things and continue to adjust the game as needed. Our goal is to host a fun event where you get to explore and use Steam in new and interesting ways, but it’s clear that this time around we could’ve done better. To help make up for all this, for everyone who was active on day 1 we’re going to increase the max points you can earn by 1000, and further increase this by another 1000 for everyone who was active on day 2 (so if you were active on both days, you’ll be able to earn another 2000 points). This will increase the maximum number of points you can earn through completing quests or achievements in your games, which you’ll then be able to spend as tokens at the Pit Stop after boosting your team.

This will all roll out during today’s race on day 3, at Magic Mountain. Thanks for your patience and best of luck!

Sincerely,
The Steam Team

Start your engines, everybody… the Steam Summer Sale has begun! For the next 14 days, enjoy great savings on a huge selection of games and join in the Steam Grand Prix 2019 event until July 7th 10AM PDT.

Choose your team from a selection of five fabulous racers: tortoise, hare, cockatiel, pig, and corgi, each with their own unique style of vehicle. Compete with your rival teams to earn points by participating in quests or earning achievements from games in your library. Every day is a new race, and a chance for a new team to win! As a daily reward for burning rubber on the track, contributing racers from teams that come in first, second or third place have a random chance to win a game from your wishlist. For Teams that place in the final, all contributing racers have a chance to win!

In addition to helping your team race to the top of the podium, you can swing by the Grand Prix Pit Stop to exchange tokens you earn for rewards such as emoticons, backgrounds and more at the Grand Prix Pit Stop.

Have you taken the time to blow some dust off your Steam library this weekend? You have two more days to dive in and play some games you haven’t looked at in a while… or at all! While you’re sweeping out the cobwebs, complete those Spring Cleaning tasks and level up your own shiny Spring Cleaning Badge. Want to put a spring in your step by trying something new? Check out the list of games that are available for free for the duration of the event (May 24 10AM - May 28 10AM PDT).

Assetto Corsa
Black Desert Online
Dead By Daylight
Don't Starve Together
Endless Space 2
Grim Dawn
Left 4 Dead 2

If you've enjoyed this year's Spring Cleaning Event art and want to memorialize it forever on your desktop, you can download Steam Spring Cleaning 2019 desktop wallpapers here.

Credit for this year's Spring Cleaning art goes to Rebecca Mock. Thanks Rebecca!

Ahh Spring! Once again, it’s time for new growth, blooming flowers, baby
birds and the annual assessment of all of your earthly possessions. This year, why limit yourself to rediscovering beloved items in your physical closets when your Steam library is full of great games that, for whatever reason, you just never got around to playing? Dust off an old favorite, launch a game you haven’t tried before and explore your backlog to unlock and level up this year’s Spring Cleaning Badge. For a breath of fresh air, why not try out something from the list of games available for free for the duration of the event (May 24 10AM - May 28 10AM PDT)?

Assetto Corsa
Black Desert Online
Dead By Daylight
Don't Starve Together
Endless Space 2
Grim Dawn
Left 4 Dead 2

Do some Spring Cleaning this weekend and spark joy in your library and backlog of titles!