With the first six months of 2018 now over with, Valve has gathered the best selling and most played games of the year into a lightly informative Best of 2018 (So Far) roundup.
While it is no doubt interesting to see how both new and old games have fared in the first half of the year, it is worth pointing out that Valve doesn’t offer a ton of specifics into the individual sales or concurrent player counts each mentioned game has achieved.
Instead, best selling games and best selling VR games categories are broken up into platinum, gold, silver, and bronze tiers, without much explanation of how many sales each group represents. Overall top sellers in the platinum tier, for example, include PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Jurassic World Evolution, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance along with free-to-play games like Warframe and Dota 2.
Meanwhile, Divinity: Original Sin II, Dragon Ball FighterZ, and Ark: Survival Evolved are among the 12 games featured in the gold tier.
For the top new releases section, a number of 2018 releases like Celeste, Monster Prom, and The Darwin Project are listed according to the month they released, but with a varying number of games listed each month and no real explanation as to a game’s performance to hint at why it is being featured.
The ‘most simultaneous players’ category provides just a little bit more information than the other best of 2018 roundups, though specifics still aren’t provided for individual games. That category breaks down top-played games into groups for 100,000+, 50,000+, 25,000+, and 15,000+ simultaneous players, offering devs a peek at the games that attracted a sizable concurrent following during the first half of the year.
Many of those ‘platinum’ games are featured in the over 100,000 simultaneous players category, though some like Kingdom Come: Deliverance fall in the 50,000+ range instead. That full list, along with Valve’s other Best of 2018 roundups, can be found on Steam.