Welcome to this week's State of the Game! Today we'll be taking a look at the Steam releases between the 27th of November and 3rd of December. The total number of games this week is just a couple shy of 300, the highest we've seen in about a month (and close to the all-time high). Consequently, the top level stats are mostly improved with the except of average hours played, which was down slightly. Let's take a deeper look at some of this week's releases and see how they stack up.
Injustice 2 didn't make its debut this week, it was actually released 2 weeks prior on the 14th of November. However, according to Steam, the release date is the 1st of December which is why it shows up here. Had it debuted back then however it wouldn't have taken out the top spot anyway, its average player count (which was about double then) putting it squarely between Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links and World of Warships in that week. The low numbers are most likely due to the game being available on consoles since May with those who wanted to play it likely having done so already.
Star Ocean - The Last Hope came to PC this week in a 4K remaster. Outside of the US, which makes up about 40% of the game's player base on Steam, it's (unsurprisingly) most popular in Japan. Players there on average rack up twice as many hours than the other top 10 countries. Interesting given that it's been available for the longest there.
The trending section also contains a couple interesting data points this week. Ice Lakes saw an incredible boost thanks to its localization efforts for the Chinese market, something which is still paying massive dividends today. Hand Simulator's The Last Hero update managed to capture the attention of a couple popular YouTuber's, skyrocketing its popularity. Lastly The Bureau: XCOM Declassified was free for a day, launching its player count into the stratosphere (peaking at over 7,000!).
