This week's State of the Game will focus on the games released on Steam between the 26th of February and the 4th of March this year. This week might just be the busiest one that Steam has ever seen as there was a record-setting 347 games released. To put that in perspective it's over double the average for last year. The cream of this week's crop all bring with them some interesting stats to look at so let's dive right in.
H1Z1, the battle royal component (the survival aspect got renamed to Just Survive), left Early Access and took out this week's top spot. It's been a tough year for the title since PUBG released, however, it wasn't always so. H1Z1: King of the Kill managed to stay ahead of PUBG for about 2 months and even continued to grow despite its competitor's popularity. However, things started to take a turn for the worse in August last year and the player base began rapidly declining before bottoming out in February this year. Exiting Early Access has proven to be quite good for it however with the average player count now double what it was just a month ago. It's still nowhere near the heights it achieved last year but considering just how much of the oxygen PUBG takes up in this genre any growth from its competitors is a reason to celebrate.
Into the Breach, the new title from the FTL developers came in at a close second and boasts this week's highest Steam review score. It's fallen to the typical 50% slump that most games get 2 weeks on from their release but even with that it's still within the top 100 games on Steam by most active players.
One interesting bit in the trending section is the game SOS which just slipped into the top 5 thanks to its Prime Time tournament. Essentially if you were in the top 8 players on the survival leaderboard you got invited to play in a special, live cast match. Even though the tournament has concluded many players are still sticking around which I'm sure the developers are counting as a resounding success!
