Last week was WILD on Steam, and not every online game needs to be free
New releases, a Chinese game nobody saw coming, even more indies, an eight-year-old Star Wars game, football frenzy, and two July games to watch.
Crumple up your bingo cards and chuck them away, because week 25 was an eventful – and unexpected – one on Steam.
Let’s kick off (pun not intended – okay, maybe a little intended)
PEAK gaming (sorry)
Last week’s top Steam game by copies sold was PEAK, a co-op mountain-climbing title. It sold a mountainous 1.1 million copies last week alone and peaked at over 100 K concurrents – with virtually no marketing. It’s continued to sell well, now sitting at 1.8 million copies sold.
Co-op is king. PEAK is yet another breakout indie hit that wears its goofiness on its sleeve and leverages cooperative play, again proving that players love fun-filled co-op that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
PEAK’s server activity spikes at 23:00 and 05:00 CET, with a large audience across the US, Russia, and Western Europe. Everybody loves a bit of absurdity.
Over 60% of PEAK players have also played R.E.P.O. (more on that one later), another indie co-op hit from this year. PEAK’s publisher, Landfall, also published Schedule I, proving this publisher has a penchant for publishing memorable indie hits.
Rematch scored the #2 spot, with 671 K copies sold last week. But now its grand total sits at 964K copies sold overall on Steam. The arcade soccer football game (I refuse to say soccer, sorry) has clearly filled a niche.
Rematch combines tight arcadey gameplay with easy-to-learn, hard-to-master mechanics. It’s almost like the football-ification of the fighting game genre.
Rocket League proved that a more arcadey take on a football-style game can work. But games that took cues from Rocket League – like Destruction AllStars and Knockout City – ultimately failed to take off. Developers took the wrong lessons: that Rocket League was lightning in a bottle and its success cannot be replicated.
However, Rematch is a new game at the right place at the right time, combining tight arcadey gameplay with easy-to-learn, hard-to-master mechanics. And its focus on football is what paid off.
Football game fans can easily pick up and play Rematch, as signalled by our data on crossover (92% of Rematch players have played Rocket League on Steam, while 82% have played FC 25)
But Rematch’s high skill ceiling (with every frame of animation mattering) means there’s plenty for core players to dig into as well.
Rematch's traction so far is proof that niche, polished, mechanically smart multiplayer games can disrupt saturated markets where innovation is slow
A quick aside: ‘’It should have been free to play’’ – NO!
We’ve seen the discourse. And yes, Sloclap’s decision to launch Rematch as a paid game might seem risky, but it was the right call at launch. Unequivocally. Not every multiplayer game needs to be free to play. Just a select few teams have the experience and money to develop a live-ops content treadmill that free-to-play gamers expect.
Not every team is as well funded as Fortnite’s Epic Games or as efficient as Marvel Rivals’ NetEase. That’s why I think the blanket critique of ‘’Why wasn’t this free-to-play!?’’ is frankly a little sluggish and a tell of someone who … I’ll say it … doesn’t understand the games market.
Launching free-to-play isn’t a magic bullet. It can be the death knell of games like this one, even good ones (look at MultiVersus). Halo Infinite couldn’t even pull it off, despite launching to massive critical acclaim.
So yes, Rematch being premium was the right play. Alright, back to the ranking.
A Chinese FMV game, two classic sci-fi franchises, and two familiar faces
Chinese FMV dating game Revenge on Gold Diggers (情感反诈模拟器) took #3 with 668 K copies sold last week. Now, it’s sold almost a million overall. The dating sim – which doesn’t have an English translation yet – tackles themes that resonate in the Chinese market (73% of its players are in China).
Dune Awakening (#4) sold 258 K copies last week, helping it cross the one-million mark. Funcom announced this milestone this week, but if you’ve been following our coverage, you already knew it was coming. 😉
Star Wars Battlefront 2 (#5), force-pulled in another 249 K copies sold last week. Despite releasing back in 2018, this EA-made PvP title got a huge -90% discount. The discounted version also included all the cosmetics released in the game’s history.
R.E.P.O (#6) sold another 233 K copies sold between June 16 and 23, bringing its lifetime copies sold to 15 million (revenues of $119 million!). R.E.P.O, showing no signs of slowing down, actually sold about 50K more copies last week than the week before. We said it before and we’ll say it again: Co-op horror sells.
Stellar Blade (#7) also continued its strong launch performance from week 24 , with another 211 K copies sold. On Steam alone Stellar Blade has now sold 1.3 million copies and generated revenues of over $61 million. China drove the majority of these sales, which you can learn more about here.
Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond, a trading-card game from Cygames, launched last week managing to amass 421 K players. Just under half of these bought the First Farer Box, which is why we decided to include it on this list. Yes, we track DLC 😉
We expect that First Farer box will be the first of many gacha pulls for Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond players, whose top markets are China (16%), the US (15%), and Japan (13%). Most of the players (71%) had already played the original Shadowverse game.
Rematch wasn’t the only socce… football game in the ranking, as EA FC 25 sold 191 K copies to become Steam’s #9 game for week 25).
EA is continuing its trend of having end-of-H1 fire sales, which saw FC’s price dropping 80% to $14 – far cheaper than its previous lowest price of $21. Despite being a console-first franchise, FC 25 has generated over $112 million on Steam and reached about 3 million players on the platform.
Finally, a real-time tactics game, Broken Arrow, launched on Steam last week to modest success. Last week alone, Broken Arrow sold 174 K copies, but it’s sold 259 K overall (when we include pre-launch sales and those after last week).
Broken Arrow is sitting on 1.5 million wishlists, so we expect sales to spike as the price drops, especially as many of the wishlisters are in price-sensitive markets like Russia (14% of wishlisters). After all, sales spiked when Broken Arrow’s price dropped from $60 to $50 a few days before the full launch.
Watch out for these two Chinese-made games next month
Wishlist data is a great predictor of success on Steam. It’s how we spotted Expedition 33, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and many other successful games for our clients before everybody else.
Quick tip: online mech game Mecha Break is sitting on 2.8 million wishlists, while Sekiro-like Wuchang: Fallen Feathers has about 1.5 million. These Chinese-developed games will make a BIG splash next month (and not just in China, as per our wishlist data), so keep an eye out on here and the Alinea blog for some deep dives.
Or, you could hit that button below:
The last word
Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. Also, tell your friends about us, subscribe, and all that!
[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]