Baldur’s Gate 3, Starfield, and Hogwarts Legacy are Steam’s most-played and best-selling 2023 games

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Baldur’s Gate 3

(Image credit: Larian)

Steam has released its annual end-of-year charts, ranking the games that have generated the most cold-hard cash on the digital PC storefront. Frequent chart-toppers this year include the obvious subjects (Baldur’s Gate 3, Starfield), as well as the games that silently crushed it (Sons of the Forest, Goose Goose Duck.)

Valve separates its year-end lists into seven categories (Top Sellers based on revenue generated, New Releases, Most Played, Early Access, Steam Deck, Controller, VR), and the company curiously doesn’t rank the entries in order. Instead, the best-performing games are grouped into platinum, gold, silver, and bronze tiers.

Baldur’s Gate 3, Starfield, Hogwarts Legacy, and survival sequel Sons of the Forest were the only new games this year to show up in the platinum tier across the Top Sellers and Most Played categories. That latter category rewards games that have crossed 300,000 concurrent Steam players, so the only other entrants include the usual evergreen suspects – Destiny 2, PUBG, Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, Dota 2, Lost Ark and Goose Goose Duck.

Baldur’s Gate 3, specifically, dominated across the charts, showing up in literally every single group aside from the best-performing VR games – for obvious reasons. Starfield also made quite the splash, sliding into the most-played controller and Steam Deck games list. Microsoft hopes that momentum can continue as it did with Skyrim, which still placed on the top sellers charts, albeit slightly lower down. (It has reached senior citizen age in video game years, to be fair.)

Among 2023’s other best-performing games are Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Street Fighter 6, Resident Evil 4 Remake, EA Sports FC, Remnant 2, Armored Core 6, Payday 3, and Cities Skylines 2. Early Access graduates that reached platinum include Baldur’s Gate 3, My Time At Sandrock, Disney Dreamlight Valley, Marvel Snap, Ready Or Not, Sun Haven, Everspace 2, Wartales, Dave The Diver, Demonologist, Against The Storm, and Farlight 84.

Platinum games in the VR category include musical slasher Beat Saber, fantasy hacker Blade & Sorcery, Pavlov, VTOL VR, Into The Radius, Bone Lab, Ghosts Of Tabor, Gorilla Tag, Fight Nights At Freddy’s: Help Wanted 2, Half-Life: Alyx, and the game that never dies, Skyrim VR.

Steam’s Winter Sale is still live with discounts on several of the above games, as well as many standout Souslikes and hidden gems.

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Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that’s vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he’ll soon forget.