Steam has added a new section to the store that tracks both real-time and weekly sales and player charts. It will replace the Stats page, and comes with plenty of features to track how games are performing each minute, day, week and month. The site can be accessed here if you want to take a look around.
The sales charts list game sales by revenue for the specified time period, whilst the most played chart shows the peak recent player count. Both of these charts also have real-time variations, showing the amount of players that are playing or buying games at any given moment.
There was an ability to see real-time top sellers before on Steam, but it has been significantly overhauled by including deluxe editions and game DLC sales, as well as a weekly chart ranking and weekly change indicators. The revamped system will allow free-to-play games to chart based on how much players are spending in them, according to the official announcement post. This change will more accurately reflect player engagement in free-to-play titles in comparison to paid ones.
For even more detailed information, the region of the top sellers chart can be changed. This allows users to look at best selling games in a variety of countries, or an overall total sales global chart. Finally, the overview screen also shows the peak online players across all of Steam, which is predictably huge. At time of writing, there’s a giant 25.7 million players online. That’s more people than the populations of Belgium and Sweden combined!
This is hardly a feature Steam urgently needed, but it’s a great little addition for gamers. Being able to track player count can better inform a customer’s purchase of an online title, where other people playing online is vital to the experience.
Will you be using the Steam sales charts to inform your future purchases? Let us know in the comments below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more gaming news.
