Welcome to State of the Game! This week we'll be covering all the games released on Steam between the 17th and 23rd of July this year. We're now well and truly out of the mid-year slump that had kept the new release stats down and this week has been quite a return to form. On the back of a staggering 195 games released this week we've seen all the top level stats improve significantly from last time. No one title took the crown for every single stat so let's dig a little into what each of these stats mean.
Dark and Light, a game that's been in development for almost a decade now, made its debut release into Early Access this week. Whilst it might not have taken the crown for average concurrent users it did have the most hours played out of any of this week's titles. It does take the crown for having the worst Steam review rating out of any of this week's top 5, although I'm sure that's a stat they're keen to forget.
Dream Daddy, the dating sim where all your potential love interests are fellow dads, manages to capture the most players on average this week whilst also being this week's highest rated game in the top 5. Looking at the other dating sim games on Steam I'd hazard a guess that the audience for Dream Daddy is a little different from the typical audience for this genre, due in part perhaps to the Game Grumps name being associated with it.
Gigantic also debuted this week after spending the better part of 2 years in an extended closed beta. After a solid few weeks however, its numbers have started to dwindle considerably. These are just the Steam numbers however so how it's doing on Xbox One is anyone's guess.
Dreamfall Chapters finalised its release this week with a Final Cut update, signalling that the game is now fully complete. This comes some 3 years after the release of the initial episode and, as such, there's a lot of play time built up over the course of the past few years. This is why we see it ranking in the top 5 regionally but not in the top 5 for this week.
Looking at the trending section this week you'd be forgiven for assuming that there was a mistake. All of this week's top 5 trending games were due to free keys being available through various platforms. The 2013 remake of Shadow Warrior takes the top spot thanks to a free key day whilst the rest make the cut thanks to massive key giveaways on various sites. These kinds of giveaways happen all the time but it's rare that more than a couple cause the game to trend enough to make it into the top 5.
