This week's State of the Game will be covering games released on Steam between the 12th and 18th of June this year. Compared to last week things are looking up slightly, most of which can be attributed to this week's top release. It's looking very likely that this slump will continue on for a few weeks to come as there haven't been any major releases on the platform recently. For now, though it seems we're in something of a mid-year slump akin to that of what we saw in the lead up to the holiday period last year, perhaps as folks were waiting for the summer sale.
Realm Grinder, originally released on Kongregate back in 2015, makes its debut on Steam during this week and managed to take out the top spot with ease. As time has gone on Realm Grinder has managed to grow its player base on Steam consistently, now averaging about double the concurrent players as it did during its release week. Whether these are purely new users or long timers making the switch to the Steam version is less clear, however, although it does appear that the Steam version is the better overall experience.
Looking at this week's top trending games there's some interesting data behind this week's top game, Hidden Folks. The developers released a large update on the 15th of June which did see a modest increase in active players. However it wasn't until 2 days later when they put the game on sale for a couple days, did they see the big jump which pushed them to the top of this chart. Just goes to show that whilst content updates are great, gamers on Steam are still very much motivated by sales. The content update then was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the game to attract a large number of new players.
