Steam's top-grossing games of 2024 revealed, analyzed

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

We’re back, folks, and it’s 2025, the year that the movie Pacific Rim is set in. So, our 2025 industry prediction is that “world leaders decide to cease funding for the Jaeger program” due to Kaiju attacks. (Wait, weren’t we meant to say something about Switch 2 here?) Anyhow, we have an action-packed newsletter for you, so let’s hit it…

Reveal: GameDiscoverCo x 50 clients, new biz star

Most of you know GameDiscoverCo from this very newsletter. But we’ve been quietly fleshing out our GDCo Pro back-end - a massively enhanced set of Steam ‘deep dive’ and console data compared to our inexpensive GDCo Plus offering - for >a year now.

So we’re delighted to announce the following:

• We’ve hit a milestone - 50 game companies licensing our ‘full’ Pro data: they span everyone from the biggest VCs, through the coolest indie publishers, and many signature firms you might have heard of. (We were stealthy about that, huh?)

• If you didn’t yet, we’ve got someone you can talk to: we’re delighted to announce that Matt Styles - former head of game events at ReedPop (PAX, EGX) and co-creator of the much loved WASD UK indie event - is joining GDCo as our head of biz dev to help us improve & expand this product & ‘take things to the next level’.

Matt’s a true friend to the game biz, and will be at GDC (San Francisco), Reboot Develop (Dubrovnik), Develop (Brighton) & Gamescom (Cologne) in 2025 if you’d like to chat to him in-person. And he’s available on email and for video demos pretty much any time.

We’re excited to be spreading the word on GDCo’s Pro Steam ‘deep dive’ and full console data - because it’s a) a great ‘we track everything’ alt to the ‘800 pound gorillas’ of the space, and b) it’s way more fully featured than other ‘ground-up’ solutions. (And it all comes with full access to the paid newsletter & Discord, of course!) Onward…

Game discovery news: oh 2024, where did you go?

Before we get onto the main feature, we have a great deal of news to catch up on since our last newsletter in mid-December. So let’s disgorge a chunk of it now:

• Lots of end-of-year round-ups hit: we really dug SkillUp’s rewind of 2024(above), Adam Millard’s ‘games you should have played in 2024’ video, and PC Gamer on why “PC gaming [in 2024] is still extremely weird” - in a good way - as well as The Verge on why gameplay diversity ruled last year. (And, uhh, Todd & Aaron’s erudition.)

• Those Switch 2 leaks keep piling up: before the holidays, more reports that Nintendo’s Switch successor will have magnetic controllers with drift-resistant sticks, and possibly extra power when docked; images of the Switch 2’s motherboard also seem to have surfaced. (But mainly: it’s a souped-up Switch!)

• Dungeon Investing’s analysis of Square Enix ends with an interesting quote: “In this market, 2 types of companies can go well. Hyper cost-conscious (PlayWay, Falcom), or really focused companies with not many releases. The era of flooding the market with AA games has passed.” (He thinks SQEX is now “focusing & avoiding cannibalization.”)

• We’ll look at unreleased Steam ‘trending games’ again on Monday, but the holiday edition saw a surprise announce & pre-order from Space Engineers 2 (#1) leading the charts, closely followed by Elden Ring Nightreign (#2), the PC version of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (#3), and the still-trending, Terraria-adjacent Kyora (#4).

• Fascinating to see the New York Times’ mainstream piece on how graphics aren’t the key trend driving video game sales, as it notes: “Optimizing cinematic games for a narrow group of consumers who have spent hundreds of dollars on a console or computer may no longer make financial sense.” (And ties in to industry woes.)

• Talking of ‘extra horsepower’,PlayStation 5 Pro got the ‘explainer’ it probably should’ve at announce, with lead architect Mark Cerny doing an in-depth ‘technical seminar’ and talking to Digital Foundry. (The tech is cutting-edge and incredibly impressive - but will most devs unlock its potential? We hope so!)

• The player-voted winners of The Steam Awards? Black Myth: Wukong made up for its possible over-reaction to not winning The Game Awards by grabbing Game Of The Year. Elsewhere, Labor Of Love went to Elden Ring + DLC, Better With Friends to Helldivers 2, and Liar’s Bar got Innovative Gameplay.

• Circana’s Nov. 2024 U.S. hardware and select software results dropped when we were out for break, and Call Of Duty 6 did very well (duh!), already becoming the #2-seller for the year. Also: PS5 $ sales were up 15% YoY, aided by PS5 Pro, and “Nintendo Switch surpassed PlayStation 2 in US lifetime hardware unit sales.”

• Looking at GDCo’s Switch eShop charts ($, recent, paid third-party, U.S. by download #), Just Dance 2025’s 60% discount charted it in the overall Top 30, MySims Cozy Bundle continues to perform at #40, while the older Sonic X Shadow Generations Deluxe rides Sonic movie mania to #90. (It’s a bit slow for brand new releases, tho.)

• Here’s an interesting stat on Sony’s PS Portal ‘WiFi x PS5 handheld’, per a Game File interview: “PS Portal usage peaks at 9pm [and] PS5 usage peaks at 8pm… Sony thinks that may mean Portal users relinquish their TVs to family by 9pm, then keep playing via their Portal.”

• As for 2024’s Twitch year in review, via StreamElements and Rainmaker.gg, there were 18.9 billion hours watched in 2024, vs. 18.5b in 2023. Twitch’s top 10 most-streamed games have “remained almost unchanged for 5 years” - headed in 2024 by GTA, LoL, Valorant, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, DOTA 2 and Minecraft.

• You know those Steam take-overs, when Valve decides your game deserves a giant editorial header on the Steam front page? According to GDCo’s Alejandro, there were 115 homepage takeovers in 2024 - all viewable via SteamDB here - compared to 94 in 2023, 92 in 2022, and 91 in 2021. The more you know…

• Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ three Essential games for Jan. 2025 are Suicide Squad, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit & The Stanley Parable; over its entire (very long!) history, Second Life has paid out $1.1 billion to creators; Meta Quest had a bad OS update over the holidays which bricked some (not often-updated) devices.

Steam's top $ games of 2024 revealed, analyzed..

We looked at the top-grossing new PC games of 2024 just before the holidays. But since then, Valve put up their ‘Best of 2024’ sale page(above), which very handily groups Steam’s top games of 2024 by gross revenue into tiers, regardless of age. So let’s look at multi-year trends, age of hits, and what those tiers might be, $-wise…

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