As we approach the end of 2018, Valve has revealed its traditional best-of-the-year lists, which includes a tiered ranking of the 100 top-selling Steam games by revenue, as well as the games that drew in the most players.
All the games you'd expect to be in the top 12 best-sellers, grouped in the Platinum tier, have made it, such as Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Rainbow Six Siege, Far Cry 5 and PUBG. Free-to-play games also make it by virtue of in-game transactions, including Dota 2 and Warframe. Elder Scrolls Online is also in the group, likely because of its various expansions this year.
It's good to see The Witcher 3, still the best game you can play on PC, make the Gold tier, which means it's one of the 24 top sellers on Steam. It's sitting alongside the likes of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Path of Exile. It's worth browsing through the full top 100 to see if any have escaped your library, and their prices and current discounts are clearly marked.
The most-played games are ranked by peak simultaneous player count, with 10 games making it over the 100,000 mark, including Team Fortress 2, Monster Hunter: World and Realm Royale. No Artifact, though—that made it into the group that pulled in more than 50,000 players. So did Football Manager 2018, Garry's Mod and, of course, Farming Simulator 19. PC gaming, eh?
Once you're done with that, you can move on to the list of the best-performing new releases, which showcases the best new sellers in every month of the year. It's far more obscure, and might be useful if you took a few months off gaming and want to see what you missed.
There are a few surprises in the best Early Access graduates: among the Platinum tier is Kenshi, Chinese Parents and Bless Online, a game I know very little about. I'm glad to see cute stealth RPG Ghost of a Tale sneak into the Gold tier, too.
Lastly, if you're looking for some new VR games, then you can browse the best-selling VR list, which is topped by the likes of Skyrim VR, Gorn and Beat Saber, which is probably the best thing you can play in VR right now. If you're looking for the best VR games of 2018, you can find our list here.
