This week's State of the Game covers the week leading up to Christmas day. It also covers of the first 3 days of the Steam Winter Sale, meaning there's going to be a lot of games vying for the Top 5 Trending spot. It seems that last week's upturn in the top level stats was an anomaly however with this week back to similar levels as it was before.
Telltale Games' latest title, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier, takes out the top spot although with a slightly milder reception than may have been anticipated. To put this in perspective the original, The Walking Dead, still averages over 1,000 concurrent users to this day. It's not all bad news however as the vast majority of people (over 70%) who bought the game played it through to completion. Additionally, it seems the release of a new series also boosts players in the previous titles so it's possible the numbers will increase over time.
GRID™ takes out the top trending spot with an impressive 22x increase in average players this week. However, it seems that this might be the last we see of this game for some time as it was removed from the Steam store less than a week ago. The reasons cited were expiring licenses so it may return sometime in the future and, thankfully, those who purchased it in the sale can still play it. One major reason for its trending is likely due to the fact that it was available for free on the Humble store starting on December 23rd.
Once again the regional data seems to be all over the place with the top games varying quite a lot between countries. Typically the data is pretty stable for the top 2 or 3 but this week it's far more varied. I don't expect this trend to continue for much longer however as we're starting to get towards the end of the holiday period.
Next week will be smack bang in the middle of the Steam Winter sale which is sure to produce some interesting results. Which games do you think will come out on top?
