Welcome to this week's State of the Game! Today we'll be covering the games released on Steam between the 7th and 13th of August this year. The ramp of the last few weeks has cooled down a bit this week with the top-most stats down across the board. Part of this is due to the lower number of releases (at least compared to last week) but it's also likely due to one of the big releases of this week falling relatively flat.
Whilst it didn't take out this week's top spot LawBreakers bears mentioning first due to the admittedly lukewarm reception it's garnered on Steam. The reviews (both on Steam and elsewhere) are mostly positive however the game has failed to capture much of an audience. The peak player count was in the low thousands during its opening week and has been in steady decline ever since. Even the dedicated few that are still playing can't pull up LawBreakers' stats with the average play time sitting around 1.5 hours total and with half its player base having played the game for less than 30 minutes. What this means for the game long term I can't be sure but Boss Key certainly has their work cut out for them.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice takes out the top spot this week by a surprisingly wide margin. It's not as big as some other titles released this year but it is comparable to some of the bigger indie titles (something which the developer, Ninja Theory, has mentioned was their target). It's also a well-played game with about 20% of players having already finished it and your average player spending almost 6 hours in it.
No Man's Sky made it into the trending section thanks to a combination of the Atlas Rises update coupled with a good old fashioned sale at 60%. That's done little to improve its rating on Steam but it's hard to ignore the fact that it's continuing to attract more players as the updates begin to roll out.
