Welcome to this week's State of the Game! Today we'll be covering the Steam releases between the 28th of August and the 3rd of September this year. This week has been an incredible one with over 280 games released, a big name Early Access title going 1.0 and the Humble Bundle making waves in the trending charts. Let's dig a little further into some of this week's numbers.
Ark: Survival Evolved gets the top spot this week with a 1.0 release that would be the envy of any AAA publisher. Whilst the average player count didn't change much it's still around double that of your typical AAA release on Steam. The new content has been keeping players playing for longer, however, with the average time playing in the last 2 weeks trending up from about 17 to 22 hours.
If it weren't for Ark then Absolver would have been this week's top release by a good margin. Its success, whilst impressive (it managed to peak at around 18,000 players), was short-lived and its active player base has decreased significantly over the following weeks. The server issues at launch coupled with a myriad of other gameplay related issues are likely the cause of this, slowly whittling away the number of players that were willing to stick around.
The Humble Jumbo bundle managed to push 3 titles (Infested Planet, The Flame in the Flood and Human: Fall Flat) into the top 5 trending this week. What's notable about those 3 particular titles is that they were all available at the $1 level. For other titles included at higher price points in the bundle, the effect was much more muted. Verdun saw no change, Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide saw a modest increase and so did American Truck Simulator. Samorost 3 did see a 5x increase, just missing out on getting in this week, however, that was only from around 20 players on average to 100 (and only for a week). Suffice to say it seems like the biggest impact for devs comes from being included at the lower price tiers.
