Welcome to this week's (belated) State of the Game! Today we'll be looking at some statistics for games released on Steam between the 4th and 10th of September this year.
Overall this week is a bit of a down week for new releases with most of the top level stats well below those of the past few weeks. Part of this is due to the number of releases being the lowest we've seen in about 8 months but there's also a lack of any big name titles released this week.
Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is this week's top game with a relatively paltry 800ish concurrent users over the week. That has steadily improved over the following weeks however with it now averaging around 3,500 users consistently. The developers have also just released their first time-limited event so expect those numbers to continue on their upward path.
Of particular note in the trending section this week is Monaco: What's Yours is Mine which managed a staggering 138x increase in its concurrent playerbase thanks to a 24 hour giveaway on Steam. Like most giveaways like that boost was short lived with the majority of the new players leaving within 4 days or so. This was likely part of a larger marketing strategy by the developer, Pocketwatch Games, whose new game Tooth and Tail was released the following week. Tune in next week to see how that worked out!
The first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead also managed to do quite well with a free key giveaway on the Humble Store. Unlike Monaco the surge lasted a bit longer with it only just returning to pre-giveaway levels around 2 weeks later. The average recent playtime also increased a fair amount, going from 3 hours up to about 5 at its peak. That shows that many of the new players were likely playing it through to the conclusion. There wasn't much, if any, flow on effect to other games in the series with their average concurrent player counts remaining steady.
