Baldur's Gate 3 Was the Biggest New Bestseller on Steam in 2023
Steam has had a record year, but barely ten most popular games, with Baldur's Gate 3 leading the way, are responsible for most of the sales revenue.
For years, the Internet has been flooded with thousands of games of varying quality. However, of the more than 14,000 titles released on Steam in 2023, more than half of the revenue was generated by just ten of the most popular games.
A record year for Steam
2023 was a record year for the largest digital game store, also in terms of the number of releases (there was a 13% increase, although not all sources confirm this; via Statista).
- Video Game Analytics reports (via VentureBeat) that as of 2019, revenue from the sale of games available on Steam has doubled and grew by 18% compared to 2022 - to $9 billion.
- Titles released in the previous twelve months are responsible for a third of this figure.
- In total, users purchased 580 million copies of games last year.
Except that the ten biggest Steam hits of 2023 brought in $1.85 billion of the $3 billion in revenue generated from the sale of all this year's releases - that's 61% of the total amount (and 20% of the revenue generated by sales of "full games" on Steam). Meanwhile, the result of the top 100 bestsellers of the past year accounted for 91% of the total revenue from new games.
Percentage of new game sales revenue on Steam generated by the top 10 best-selling games in a given year.Source: Video Game Analytics.
Baldur's Gate 3 will dominate Steam in 2023
The biggest winner turned out to be Baldur's Gate III, which probably comes as no surprise to anyone. After the phenomenal launch in August, the title is still one of the best-selling games on Steam (at the time of publishing this text, it was second on the bestseller list). This unflagging popularity enabled Larian's work to bring in $677 million on Steam, which represents 21% of the revenue generated from the sale of all games released in 2023.
At the same time, it is worth mentioning that among the 14,000 launches, only 309 were made available in free-to-play model, and only about 700 (5%) earned more than $100,000. Even after taking into account all of the more than 100,000 titles (sic!) available in the Steam library, less than 1% earned sales revenue of more than $1 million in 2023. In other words, less than a handful of video games are truly profitable.
Arguably, this trend will continue in 2024, although this year is expected to be much worse than the previous one. Fewer major launches, anticipated declines in console prices and pressure from subscription services are expected to make it difficult for Steam to match its record 2023 performance.
