Eight F2P Games Crack Steam's Top 100 For 2016
Despite some missteps -- No Man's Sky, anyone? -- 2016 was a pretty good year for gaming. But "good" is relative, and we can all claim that Game X did well or Game Y did poorly or that Game Z did better than both of them. Without numbers to back those assertions up, it's all speculative and open to interpretation.
Fortunately, for the factual-minded among us, Valve did a little bit of legwork to give us some accurate information regarding how well games performed on Steam in 2016. Over the weekend, it released a list of the top 100 highest-grossing games on the platform for 2016, sorted into four descending categories: Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Though games within each category aren't sorted, and this only counts revenue gained via Steam, these groupings at least give us a little solid info to grade games' successes this past year.
Out of the 100 games, eight were fully free-to-play:
Platinum: Dota 2
Gold: Warframe, Team Fortress 2
Silver: Smite, War Thunder
Bronze: Knight Online, Tree of Savior, Path of Exile
It should also be noted that Battlerite -- currently in paid early access but scheduled for a F2P launch in 2017 -- cracked the Bronze tier. Also, both incarnations of the formerly free-to-play H1Z1 made the list -- King of the Kill was Gold, while Just Survive was Bronze.
I'm a little surprised to see Team Fortress 2 still maintaining such a high placement on the list. Despite its age, it hasn't been totally eclipsed by newer hero shooter games. Then again, being a Valve game, it undoubtedly receives 100% of its income from Steam, unlike games like Warframe or Path of Exile, which also have individual client downloads.
Knight Online, though, is a game I wouldn't have thought to make the list, especially with its 45% positive rating. But sometimes it's not about how much you're loved, but how much you can sell; No Man's Sky is a Platinum game, after all, and it's probably the least-approved game on the list, at 31%.
Did anything else stand out to you on Valve's list of highest-grossing games for 2016?
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About the Author
Jason Winter is a veteran gaming journalist, he brings a wide range of experience to MMOBomb, including two years with Beckett Media where he served as the editor of the leading gaming magazine Massive Online Gamer. He has also written professionally for several gaming websites.
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