![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Steam-1.jpg?resize=590%2C354\")
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One of the big trends in video games over the past couple of years has been the concept of \u201cgames as a service.\u201d Under this sales model, a customer doesn\u2019t simply buy a game once. Instead, the game constantly evolves, adding more content on a regular basis, such as more playable characters, maps, cosmetic options and competitive modes.<\/p>\n
The base game itself may be anywhere from inexpensive to entirely free, but its players keep the money rolling in by picking up occasional optional purchases.<\/p>\n
Steam recently announced its \u201cBest of 2018<\/a>,\u201d ranking the top 100 games on its online storefront by various metrics. At a glance, it says that 2018 was a big year for games as a service on Steam, and perhaps a bigger year than a lot of customers realized.<\/p>\n The Top Sellers of 2018<\/a>, as determined by the amount of overall revenue generated by a product through all available purchases and services, only had three 2018 releases in the top twelve: Far Cry 5, Assassin\u2019s Creed: Odyssey, <\/em>and Monster Hunter: World.<\/em><\/p>\n The rest were service-oriented games, designed to attract and keep a regular audience via the service model. Most notably, Rockstar\u2019s open-world crime game Grand Theft Auto V <\/em>is still pulling top-ten revenue numbers three years after its release on PC, entirely on the strength of its online mode, and Digital Extremes\u2019\u00a0Warframe <\/em>has risen to become one of the highest-revenue games on Steam as it approaches its sixth anniversary.<\/p>\n There are a few other surprises. The Witcher III <\/em>is still moving units three and a half years after its release;\u00a0Kingdom Come: Deliverance <\/em>overcame bad controls and initial controversy<\/a> to reach the top 24; and the unforgiving survival game Frostpunk <\/em>managed to become a solid success despite being one of the most bleak experiences on the market.<\/p>\n Other big games-as-a-service winners in 2018 include the asymmetric multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight, <\/em>which undoubtedly profited from its primary genre competitor, Friday the 13th: The Game, <\/em>having to suddenly cease updating entirely<\/a> due to a legal dispute over the film franchise\u2019s property rights; the dinosaur-riding survival game Ark; <\/em>and the free-to-play action-RPG Path of Exile<\/em>, which released new expansions in December of 2017 and 2018.<\/p>\n The list of games that were played by the most people in 2018<\/a> on Steam, as measured by highest simultaneous player count, was unsurprisingly dominated by Valve\u2019s own products: three of the top spots were taken by Counter-Strike, Defense of the Ancients 2, <\/em>and Team Fortress 2<\/em>. Ubisoft\u2019s Rainbow Six: Siege <\/em>overcame a troubled launch period in 2015<\/a> to gradually accumulate a fervent following, coming in at No. 4. PlayerUnknown\u2019s Battlegrounds <\/em>continued to pull big numbers, as did Capcom\u2019s Monster Hunter: World.<\/em><\/p>\n The Pacific Northwest had a handful of big local releases this year, many of which pulled in strong digital sales. Matt Makes Games\u2019\u00a0Celeste<\/em>, Subset\u2019s Into the Breach, <\/em>Harebrained Scheme\u2019s BattleTech<\/em>, Paizo\u2019s Pathfinder: Kingmaker<\/em>, Valve\u2019s Artifact<\/em>, and Microsoft and Insomniac\u2019s Sunset Overdrive <\/em>(making its long-overdue PC debut) all managed to score sales in the top 12 on Steam during the month of their respective releases. ConcernedApe\u2019s Stardew Valley, <\/em>which is once again being self-published<\/a>, rode its multiplayer update in August to a renewed wave of interest in the game, bringing its sales up to reach the top 100 for the year.<\/p>\n This obviously only tells part of the story for 2018. Some of the biggest games of the year never saw a release on Steam at all, most notably Fortnite,<\/em> Call of Duty: Black Ops IV, <\/em>and Red Dead Redemption II, <\/em>the latter of which has yet to see a PC port.<\/p>\n Steam also only released data in the form of these relative rankings on the charts, which suggests nothing about what the actual numbers were. The \u201cplatinum\u201d and \u201cgold\u201d ranking categories only list the games in random order, rather than serving as a sequential \u201ctop twelve\u201d; if you hit F5 on the page, the games get rearranged.<\/p>\n In past years, we might have been able to compare them to the data mined via SteamSpy to get a fuller picture, but that site\u2019s been slowing down lately because its creator, Sergey Galyonkin, has been gainfully employed<\/a> working on Epic Games\u2019 online store.<\/p>\n That said, we already know that Steam is heading into a challenging, potentially definitional year for the storefront. It\u2019s likely to survive, of course \u2014 as noted earlier, some of the most popular games on Steam are published by Valve, so they won\u2019t be going anywhere \u2014 but it\u2019s got incoming competition.<\/p>\n That\u2019s coming from Discord<\/a>, which recently upped the ante by increasing the revenue earned by sellers on its storefront to a full 90 percent, plus Epic and some big players that are becoming increasingly comfortable<\/a> with moving much of their sales model to an all-digital format. Steam has played a big part over the last decade or so in shaping the current PC-gaming environment, and in getting a lot of big new players involved in the ecosystem. Now, it\u2019s got everyone gunning for its No. 1 spot, and we\u2019re likely to see some big moves soon if it intends to continue to thrive.<\/p>\n UPDATED 3:30 P.M.: Corrected company name for Warframe to Digital Extremes.<\/em><\/p>\n Powered by WPeMatico<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the big trends in video games over the past couple of years has been the concept of \u201cgames as a service.\u201d Under this sales model, a customer doesn\u2019t simply buy a game once. Instead, the game constantly evolves, adding more content on a regular basis, such as more playable characters, maps, cosmetic options… Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":57923,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[174,377],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games-media","category-gaming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t![\"BattleTech\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/battletech1-630x354.jpg?resize=630%2C354\")