People like to buy games from, and play games in, Steam, but anyone interested in really poking around the site (like us, it’s our job) has two things they want to know: which games are selling the most copies, and which games are being played the most.
Valve’s new “Steam Charts” page puts all that in the one place, and makes the whole process a lot nicer while you’re at it. A statement from the company says:
Today we’re launching Steam Charts, a new section of Steam that is dedicated to showing the most-played and top-selling games on Steam. Including numbers in real time.
The Steam Charts page replaces Steam Stats as a one-stop-overview of what’s popular on Steam, whether it’s in real-time, by week, or even by month. Steam Charts also gathers numbers in more detail to allow for a more complete picture of which games players are excited about.
It’s basically a single page containing all the popularity-related data you’d want to know (aside from actual number of units sold, which lol as if Valve is ever going to release that), with the page leading with how many people are currently online.
It then shows the five best-selling games and five most-played games, with the ability to quickly expand those charts to display the top 100 in both fields. Then there are weekly top-sellers, top new releases and quick links to other useful Steam-related data pages like Valve’s hardware survey results—always interesting for their breakdown of the GPU market, if nothing else—and download stats.
To be clear, very little of this is new, though I think the “live” sales charts have some welcome additions, like how many weeks the game has been in the charts, and how many places it has moved up or down over the last week. Overall, this is just a welcome refresh of the way the data is presented.
Data nerds can check it out here.