A video shows which games on Steam had the most players from early 2015 to the end of 2018. Anyone who watches the video understands the current gaming market and why everyone is making live games. The pseudo-MMOs dominate.
The video shows: The video from the YouTube channel “The Rankings” highlights the 15 games with the most daily players on Steam.
It starts on January 1, 2015, and ends on December 31, 2018.
- The games are represented as bars. The longer a bar is, the more players the game has, growing to the right.
- The titles move up and down as places change.
What is so fascinating about the video: The video clarifies some things.
- Blockbuster games come and go – titles like XCom 2 create a stir briefly but then fall like a stone once players are done with the game
- Online games that are regularly expanded have repeated high phases and are generally stable
- Dota 2 and CS:GO, Valve’s own games, have been incredibly stable hits on Steam over the last 3 years that hardly anyone could threaten until the “battle royale” trend broke out
- PUBG and to a lesser extent H1Z1 were huge Steam-changing phenomena. The “battle royale” trend hit like a bomb on Steam
- ARK Survival Evolved, Rust, and Monster Hunter World play a much larger role on Steam than one thinks
What the chart does not show: Clearly missing is the gigantic influence of “Fortnite” on the gaming market. The influence of Fortnite began to fully hit around March 2018 when Fortnite entered the mainstream.
It is not directly reflected in the chart because Fortnite is not a Steam game.
However, the influence is seen indirectly in the decline of the previously booming PUBG and the overall Steam numbers going down while they had been growing until then.
The video shows about the gaming market: The video explains why all publishers want to make “live service” games and align their strategy towards these “games as a service” titles.
They want to develop games that:
- are online
- and multiplayer
- and can be expanded over the years
Even the huge single-player blockbusters like Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 are just outliers in this video.
The actually smaller online games like Rocket League, Warframe, Rust, or ARK Survival Evolved hold out longer, may boom again later with a new patch, or even develop sustainably well like Warframe.
Thus, these games also keep making money for the publishers all the time.
No wonder publishers love this model so much and the gaming market is aligning towards developing more of these live games.
