Last week’s top Steam games by copies sold
Two extraction shooters, two co-op games, and an interactive story made the top five. And the majority are hilarious. Good times.
ARC Raiders unsurprisingly leads the pack
ARC Raiders, which launched on October 30, led last week on Steam (3 to 9 Nov) with 928K copies sold and nearly $30 million in revenue.
ARC has now amassed 2.4M copies sold on Steam as per our estimates. Taking regional pricing differences into account, that’s $80 million in gross revenue on Steam via copies sold alone.
Embark announced that ARC Raiders has now sold over 4 million copies. We estimated around 3.7 million copies across Steam, PS5, and Xbox. That’s a margin of error of around -7.5% (lush!) And ARC is also on the Epic Game Store.
This 3.7M is up quite a bit from our 2.5M estimate last week, thanks to positive word of mouth, viral player stories, and consistent support from the developers keeping the momentum going.
And ARC has been impressively sticky so far. Our Steam estimates show that its DAUs climbed every day last week, peaking at 1.4 million on Sunday:
As you can see, DAUs decreased on Monday (which is typical after the weekend spikes), but only marginally by under 75K players.
Learn more about what made ARC such a success here.
On PS5, meanwhile, ARC Raiders’ DAUs have increased every day since launch, peaking at a little over 280K on Monday:
ARC’s gameplay mix combines cooperative social dynamics, strong progression, and a hopeful world that players clearly want to return to. HUGE congrats to Embark Studios. Scandinavian game devs continue to hit it out of the park!
Speaking of which…
Wacky co-op games take the next two spots
Then there’s Swedish-made RV There Yet?, which shifted another 594K copies last week, bringing its total to 3.3 million. RV taps into that rising interest in low-price low-fi co-op titles that are quirky, crazy or cute – crazy, this time.
RV There Yet? sees players working together to drive – you guessed it – an RV through a dangerous backcountry route to reach Route 65. It has goofy physics and chaotic, janky moments galore.
Players are tasked with supplies like food and fuel, and work together to keep the road trip going. RV’s comedic physics and mishaps have been a hit on socials. It’s one of those highly “clippable” games – as the kids say – that grow via viral discovery.
Co-op climbing game PEAK, which launched in June, is another one of those clippable (😎) games. PEAK sold another 435K copies last week (!?), bringing its total to just shy of 14M copies sold.
PEAK also 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.
Discounts have helped keep PEAK in the conversation and visible on Steam during content drops. As you can see below, the price drop from the usual $7.99 price to $4.95 has the highest impact on sales.
PEAK’s daily sales data shows a clear and powerful relationship between price and demand:
Visibility weakens naturally over time, and PEAK was on track to fall into the long-tail phase typical for its category in early August.
The first major price cut in August to $4.95 reversed that downward trend. Daily sales jumped from ~85K at $7.99 to 253K-298K at $4.95, more than tripling unit sales on discounted days.
This drove PEAK back up the Steam charts, regaining store visibility and reinforcing word-of-mouth strength.
Although revenue per copy dropped, the total revenue jump more than compensated (discounted days generated 2x-3x prior revenue levels)
PEAK’s second discount to $4.95 on November 5 helped the game shift 435K copies last week, up from 132K the previous week. Revenues last week were $1.8 million, more than double the week before that ($850K).
This reflects the same elasticity: the discount reliably reignites attention and boosts conversion rates. By pulling the game back into algorithmic featuring (Trending, Top Sellers), the studio effectively bought long-term discovery at a short-term margin cost.
Each sale surge corresponds with chart presence and social content spikes, keeping the game culturally relevant far longer than typical indie life cycles.
With each price drop delivering outsized revenue gains and audience expansion, PEAK’s strategy of well-timed discounts during content updates is proving to be one of its most valuable growth levers.
It’s a tried-and-true strategy. If it ain’t broke…
Like a duck to water: A parody game extracts plenty of copies sold on Steam
Escape From Duckov sold 359K copies last week (over $5M in revenue). To date, the top-down extraction shooter has sold over 3.3 million copies and generated $43M+. It’s a clear tongue-in-cheek riff on Escape from Tarkov.
Humour can be a powerful market differentiator, and Duckov has used it effectively to broaden an audience that might otherwise avoid the genre’s intensity. The wacky premise of a cartoonish duck in a dark and serious extraction shooter setting works.
However, Duckov also delivers legitimately engaging gameplay. Its clear nods to the hardcore extraction genre work well for fans of the genre (which are on the up – see the #1 game!)
Duckov was developed by Chinese studio Team Soda, a subsidiary of China tech conglomerate bilibili. Therefore, it’s perhaps unsurprising that two million of the copies (65% of them) sold were in China.
Telltale-like interactive games are BACK
Dispatch, which developer AdHoc describes as a superhero workplace comedy, sold 297K copies on Steam last week. It’s an animated episodic game story built by former Telltale leadership. The first two episodes launched on October 22, with two episodes a week happening until November 12.
Dispatch’s momentum has shot it to nearly 1.5 million copies sold across platforms and over $30M in revenue to date. Players are clearly enjoying its cinematic comedy, heartfelt writing, and stacked cast, including Aaron Paul, Laura Bailey, and major streamers.
While the streamer VO is jarring (their performances pale in comparison to the other voice actors), the combination has generated organic exposure and strong cultural pickup. Dispatch is intentionally designed to play well on streams.
Dispatch fills a gap left since Telltale’s collapse, giving fans the polished, choice-driven interactive storytelling they’ve been craving.
With episodes 7 and 8 dropping tomorrow, Dispatch’s visibility is only going to increase. Will it end with a bang? We’ll be covering the game’s performance on Thursday’s newsletter, so hit subscribe below to get it in your inbox ASAP.
Games are funny now?
Comedy dominates passive entertainment like TV, film, and podcasts, but gaming has historically struggled to embrace it. In linear media, it’s easier to control the timing, creators. Punchlines land as intended.
Games mostly hand timing over to the player, so a player joke can miss entirely if a player looks the wrong way or triggers scenes out of order. That challenge has made many studios wary of building comedy-first experiences.
But last week’s top sellers show how powerful humour can be in gaming when handled well. Four of the top five are intentionally funny, and they approach comedy from different angles.
Co-op titles lean into chaos. Physics-driven mishaps, unexpected failures, and collaborative confusion let players generate their own laughs. The humour is emergent, not scripted.
It’s no surprise, then, that the number of games tagged as ‘’ funny’’ on Steam has been steadily growing over the past decade:
Over 2,819 new games on Steam last year were tagged as ‘’funny’’, up almost 50% from 2023, much higher than the growth of new releases overall (+11%)
These co-op games are creasing (that’s Welsh slang for hilarious), but Dispatch represents the other successful path: sharply written narrative comedy with strong performances and purposeful pacing. By controlling scene flow and using cinematic storytelling techniques, AdHoc ensured the jokes land.
With all these hilariously goofy co-op games, last year’s Thank Goodness You’re Here! (my #3 game of last year), and now Dispatch, I’d say yes: Games can be funny now.
And you love to see it.
Other insights, links, and cool stuff
We had plenty of press coverage of our ARC Raiders write-up last week, including from our friends at GameSpot, Eurogamer, and wccftech.
Speaking of the press, we just had a lovely chat with IGN’s Rebekah Valentine about the implications of GTA VI’s delay, so look out for our commentary later this evening.
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