(For The Moment) Warframe Is (Maybe) The Top-Selling F2P Game On Steam

By Jason Winter, News Editor Posted: June 22, 2018

"Top-selling F2P game" is a bit of an oxymoron in itself, but that hasn't stopped Warframe from reaching the top of the charts on Steam -- maybe.

If you look at the "Top Sellers" tab on the "Free to Play Games on Steam" page, you'll see Warframe at the top of the list. It's ahead of Valve's own Dota 2, and if that's indicative of relative sales -- in other words, if it means Warframe is making more money than Dota 2 -- that's really saying something. Big as it is, Warframe only has about 15% the concurrent players that Dota 2 has on Steam, so for it to surpass the MOBA in sales is outstanding.

Here's where all the caveats kick in. I'm not 100% convinced that the order of games on that "Top Sellers" list is a strict and accurate ordering. If you look at the "What's Being Played" tab (which has "ConcurrentUsers" in its URL) and compare that to the actual list of what's being played, you'll see that it matches up ... for a while.

I pulled these rankings just after the top of the hour, when (I think) Steam updates them. The What's Being Played tab looks right up until War Thunder, and then it lists Smite, which has several other F2P games ahead of it on the stats page. Maybe the two lists aren't updated at the same time, and the lists did match up, say, around midnight? Or maybe the tabs on the F2P page are more of a general listing, rather than an exact one? It's hard to say.

In any case, Warframe is undoubtedly one of the best-selling F2P games on Steam right now. Whether it's #1, and will stay at #1, is up for debate.

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In this article: Smite, Warframe, War Thunder, Digital Extremes.

About the Author

Jason Winter, News Editor

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.

More Stories by Jason Winter

Time Is Money 6 years ago

Steam Store page listings are updated less frequently (and may be based on an average), while the stats page is updated every few minutes. Most of those F2P games in that snapshot also have concurrent player counts that are within a couple thousand of each other. They could conceivably switch ranking in under an hour as they peak at different times.

Dioxety 6 years ago

I’ve seen Warframe at the top sellers a few times actually. Usually after big updates and a new prime access it sits up there for a week or 2.

rickshaw 6 years ago

I haven't played in a long while since before the update of the new worldy thing,

Rea 6 years ago

One of the best things in Warframe is the proximity of the community with the developer team, they respond to the player base complains and this is really rare in the MMO world, normally the devs don't even care about the community existence, and there is the really good pace of new frames comming in, not to fast and not to slow, Warframe is a really enjoyable game but more than that DE is one of those rare developers who trully love their creation and care for the playerbase in a level who keep some of the oldest player and bring new ones, it's not really rare play with founder in Warframe for example, and that tell a lot about a 5 years old game, the game have his problems as well but the qualities keep overshadowing they.

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