Welcome to this week's State of the Game! Today we'll be taking at the Steam releases between the 2nd and 8th of October this year. After the stellar week of releases last week it was inevitable that a down week would follow however it's still not the worst in recent memory (that goes to the start of September). Let's take a closer look at this week's top titles.
Battle Chasers: Nightwar, the first title from Airship Syndicate that was crowdfunded on Kickstarter back in 2015, takes out this week's top spot. The beta that was run on Steam starting on the 9th of September wasn't particularly popular, attracting a few hundred users at its peak. By comparison, its opening week was a lot stronger, peaking at roughly 5,000. It hasn't escaped the typical 2-week post-launch decline however with the average concurrent users now hovering at about 1,000.
Comparatively A Hat in Time and Castle Clicker has kept their respective playerbases steady whilst Doki Doki Literature Club has grown it to 3 times its opening week's numbers. Road Redemption's official release doesn't appear to have done it many favors with its player count now half of what it was at its peak.
Keen observers will note that The Culling dominates the regional charts but doesn't show up anywhere in the top games for this week. Primarily that's a function of the data that's available, only showing total hours played. In that respect, The Culling does have a lot of play time in it but not a lot of it has happened recently. Indeed even leaving Early Access wasn't enough to move the needle on that game's playerbase much. It's tough being in competition with Steam's current darling PUBG.
This week's trending section has an interesting mix of trend reasons the most surprising of which was the return of online multiplayer to the original Star Wars: Battlefront 2. Considering the new version is due out soon it's an interesting move on the part of Disney. Whether or not that endears anyone to the new title is anyone's guess, however.
