February may have been the shortest month of the year, but that doesn't mean a shortage of top releases on Steam.

This month's lists showcase the top titles released in February (measured by the revenue generated during the first two weeks after their launch) and the top five free to play releases (measured by unique player count). As always, we take a look at some of the trends in these charts. But as a special part of this post, we’ve also included a spotlight section with two of the teams featured this month: Flying Oaks Games (ScourgeBringer) & Ink Stains Games (Stoneshard).


The first thing we noticed this month is the high volume of games using Early Access. With nearly half of the games this month graduating to full release or making their debuts, Early Access continues to be a successful option for developers and players alike. When we launched Early Access back in 2013, we hoped that the program would provide developers with an optional path to work on their game alongside data and feedback from players. It’s great to see so many studios finding success through Early Access.


Meanwhile, we continue to see new dev teams scoring a spot at the top of the charts. This month an astounding 11 games are coming from teams releasing their first ever Steam product. To Comfy Company, DeGenerals, Echo Entertainment, The Elephant Crew, Mastfire Studios Pty Ltd, panstasz, Placeholder Gameworks, SouthPAW Games, Spiderling Studios, SukeraSomero, WOLCEN Studio, welcome and congrats on your success.


Obviously, finding success with a first release is not something that every team achieves. For many developers, a first release can be challenging and rewarding experience, but one that doesn't lead to a spot on a monthly top release list. This month we thought it would be great to celebrate some of the teams whose first releases didn't make a top 20 list, but have found their way on to this month’s charts with a subsequent release. We asked Flying Oak Games (ScourgeBringer) and Ink Stains Games (Stoneshard) about the biggest takeaways from their first launches, how those translated to success this time around, and what they'd recommend to other developers who didn't make a top 20 list with their first launch.

In 2016 Flying Oak Games released the twin-stick shooter, NeuroVoider, for both consoles and Steam. The team points out that not enough focus was put on the quality of that title’s PC features. So, when they set out to make this month's hit, ScourgeBringer, Flying Oak made it a goal to ensure that their PC features be fully developed.

As Thomas Altenburger from the Flying Oak team puts it, "Quality depended on properly responding to our PC players, so we put extra effort into including as many Steam features as possible: Extended settings (e.g., full control support and remapping), working toward a crash free release, and localizing the game in as many languages as possible."

The team also said they were much more aware of Steam tags this time around. Rather than waiting to see how players decided to tag the game, they put emphasis on researching and selecting appropriate Steam tags before release. By carefully researching similar games, they were able to target players who were more likely to be interested in ScourgeBringer.

"We noticed that Steam is targeting players with similar interests more efficiently than in 2016,” said Thomas. “Understand: Set your tags right! We're pleased to see that new players are already familiar with the genres."

Finally, Flying Oak emphasized the importance of their publisher, Dear Villagers, who were able to create a focused marketing campaign that targeted relevant markets by using content creators specifically tailored for them.

"It has been hard, but we're very proud of the result and more importantly,” said Thomas. “Steam players seem to acknowledge the effort!"


When designing their latest title, Stoneshard, Ink Stains Games set out to create a product that was much bigger in scope than their first game 12 is Better Than 6. According to the team, the big difference this time around came from placing a greater focus on expanding their engagement with the community. Speaking with the team about the ways they made this happen, there was an emphasis on paying more attention to a global audience.

"From the very beginning, we chose Steam as one of our main community platforms, giving it priority over our other social networks,” said Andrey Tsypaiev from Ink Stains. “Here, we regularly published devlogs about our progress in several languages - this approach allowed us to build several regional communities around our game."

If you follow Stoneshard on Steam, you've probably seen these devlogs in the game's News Hub. Each one gives unique insights into the development path, along with sneak previews and colorful gifs showcasing upcoming features. Something that isn't always obvious to players though, is the fact that the team creates several localized versions of these devlogs. Regardless of what language a player has Steam set to, Ink Stains is able to share Stoneshard development with their entire community.

Andrey's advice to other teams, "Start working with the community as soon as possible. This strategy allows you to create the backbone of a community you will be working with later."


Thank you and congratulations to both Ink Stains Games and Flying Oak Games for sharing their experiences in creating a Top Release of February 2020.

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If you've made it this far, here's the list of February's top releases ordered by release date (we've organized this list on a sale page too):


ScourgeBringer
Flying Oak Games & E-Studio (France & Finland)


Stoneshard
Ink Stains Games (Russia)


Azur Lane Crosswave
IDEA FACTORY, COMPILE HEART & FELISTELLA (Japan)


Being a DIK - Season 1
Dr PinkCake (Sweden)


DAEMON X MACHINA
Marvelous Inc. (Japan)


Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem
WOLCEN Studio (France)


Metro Exodus
4A Games (Ukraine & Malta)


Senren＊Banka
Yuzusoft (Japan)


Besiege
Spiderling Studios (UK)


Blackwake
Mastfire Studios Pty Ltd (Australia & US)


Skul: The Hero Slayer
SouthPAW Games (Republic of Korea)


Taur
Echo Entertainment (Sweden)


Death and Taxes
Placeholder Gameworks (Estonia)


Tank Mechanic Simulator
DeGenerals (Poland)


WORLD OF HORROR
panstasz (Poland)


Dungeon Defenders: Awakened
Chromatic Games (US)


Max Gentlemen Sexy Business!
The Men Who Wear Many Hats (US)


Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection
CAPCOM CO., LTD. (Japan)


ONE PUNCH MAN: A HERO NOBODY KNOWS
Spike Chunsoft Co. Ltd. (Japan)


OshiRabu: Waifus Over Husbandos
SukeraSomero (Japan)

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Dota Underlords
Valve (US)


RISK: Global Domination
SMG Studio (Australia & US)


I Wanna Maker
The Elephant Crew (US)


Moe Era
Comfy Company (Russia)


绝望监牢 / 絶望プリズン
Studio Wasabi (Japan)

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If you're curious about previous months, here are more Top Release lists:

• The Top Releases of May
  
• The Top Releases of June
  
• The Top Releases of July
  
• The Top Releases of August
  
• The Top Releases of September
  
• The Top Releases of October
  
• The Top Releases of November
  
• The Top Releases of December
  
• The Top Releases of January

Cheers!
-The Steam Team

Today we released the Steam Interactive Recommender, a way for users to harness the power of machine learning to discover personalized, interactive recommendations, based on your patterns of play. Along with powerful tag-based filters, you can tailor your results on the fly, selecting your own balance of popular or niche, and recent or classic titles, to find just the right games you're in the mood to play.

Recommendations generated by the system will appear on your store homepage. The Explore and Customize button leads to the full Interactive Recommender, where you can adjust parameters and save settings. Any customizations you make will also be used on the homepage.

Originally Steam Labs Experiment 002: Interactive Recommender, this new feature is now available to all users in the Steam store.



You can also access the Interactive Recommender by visiting https://store.steampowered.com/recommender, or find it in the Your Store menu.



The Interactive Recommender uses a machine learning model that is trained based on the playtime histories of millions of Steam users. It's not directly affected by tags or reviews—it instead learns about the games on Steam by looking at what users actually play. The basic idea is that if there are other players with similar play habits to you, who also play a game that you haven't tried yet, then that game is likely to be one you'll enjoy too.

We're also starting to apply the underlying model in other parts of the Steam store, where we think it can help players see the most relevant content or make more informed choices. For example, when viewing the page for a particular game, you may sometimes see "Players like you love this game" shown as a reason why the game is relevant to you, alongside other factors.

The Interactive Recommender isn't a replacement for our existing content discovery systems, but rather an addition to the variety of ways Steam recommends games to players. Although it's a powerful tool, there are some things it can't do. For example, it can't recommend new releases that nobody has played yet, while the Discovery Queue is designed to do just that. That said, we are starting to use the technology underlying the Interactive Recommender to power other features on Steam such as Steam Labs Experiment 008: Play Next, which recommends games you've already purchased but for whatever reason have not yet played. The result is a Steam experience that is more effective at connecting customers to games they'll love across a variety of scenarios.

The Steam Interactive Recommender was first released as part of our Steam Labs initiative. Feedback from visitors to the Labs helps us evaluate and iterate on potential new Steam features like this one. While in development, your feedback led us to add tag filtering and saved settings for even more powerfully-guided recommendations. We also looked at quantitative data, measuring clickthrough rates, and conversion rates to wishlist and purchases of games from both the home page capsule, and the full Interactive Recommender page. The data compared favorably with other Steam features, not just in the few weeks after introduction, but consistently over the following months, giving us confidence that this tool is providing long term value in helping users find games they enjoy. It's also pleasing to note that games found this way covered a large portion of our catalog, not just the most popular hits, with well over 10,000 different games purchased as a result of visits to the Interactive Recommender page.

Thanks to everyone who helped us refine the Interactive Recommender for release. Check out other ongoing experiments at https://store.steampowered.com/labs.

Try the Interactive Recommender today!