Valve has released its charts of the best-selling and most played games on Steam in 2018, and while new releases like Monster Hunter: World and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has breakout years it was games with regular content drops that seem to be doing most well.

Though Valve doesn’t disclose specific sales or revenue numbers in its charts, it does stratify games into distinct tiers, giving us a glimpse into how groups of games did relative to each other.

First up: Best-sellers. While 2018 titles like Monster Hunter: World, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and Far Cry 5 made the platinum tier of titles who grossed the most revenue (allowing free-to-play titles with microtransactions to compete), nine of the twelve titles in that tier were games actually released before this year, but received regular or major content updates this year. The twelve best-selling titles are:

• Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
• Dota 2
• Grand Theft Auto V
• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
• Warframe
• Rocket League
• Rainbow Six Siege
• The Elder Scrolls Online
• Far Cry 5
• Civilization VI
• Monster Hunter: World
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Older titles were also popular as you go down the tiers, as games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Dead By Daylight, and more dominate the gold tier. The silver tier has more new titles, however, as Dragon Ball FighterZ, The Forest, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and a few other new titles make a name for themselves there.

When it comes to the most played games, we get a little more specific information. The titles in the highest tier managed to exceed over 100,000 simultaneous players on Steam. Only 10 titles accomplished the feat. They are:

• Monster Hunter: World
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
• Path of Exile
• Team Fortress 2
• Dota 2
• Grand Theft Auto
• Rainbow Six Siege
• Realm Royale
• Playerunknowon’s Battlegrounds
• Warframe

Several titles, like Valve’s own Artifact, Warhammer: Vermintide II, Kingdom Come Deliverance, and early access game The Scroll of Taiwu all exceeding 50,000 players.

You can also see a breakdown of the best-selling games stratified by month, as well as the most popular games that left early access this year, and the best-selling VR games.

The Metro Exodus story is all about leaving the familiar behind and seeking fortune elsewhere. This theme extends to the franchise’s approach to the digital marketplace as well. Today Deep Silver and Epic Games announced a partnership that makes the Epic Games Store the sole digital distributor of the PC version of the game moving forward.

“Metro Exodus is amazing and is deservedly one of the most anticipated PC titles of 2019,” said Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney. “We are partnering with Deep Silver to launch Metro Exodus, underpinned by Epic’s marketing support and commitment to offering an 88% revenue split, enabling game creators to further reinvest in building great games and improving the economics of game stores for everybody.”

When Epic Games announced the 88/12 revenue split, we expected to see many publishers reconsider their relationship with Steam, where Valve keeps 30 percent of the profit unless a game hits a $50 million threshold, whereafter the split transitions to 80/20. Metro is now the second high-profile title to defect, following Ubisoft’s The Division 2.

Those who already pre-purchased Metro Exodus on Steam or any other digital retailer will still receive the game on that platform when it launches on February 15. But those who pre-order the game on the Epic Games Store will also receive a deal. The pricing starts at $49.99, as opposed to $59.99 on Steam. Later this year, Deep Silver plans to release Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light on the Epic Games Store as well.

Tag-team fighter/dress-up game most of its characters look uncomfortable to be a part of SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy will be heading to Steam next week.

The game will head to the PC platform on February 21, SNK announced the news at this year’s Evo Japan. Though no trailer for the game is officially available online as of this writing, a fan attending the event was able to capture off-screen footage of a trailer playing at Evo Japan making the announcement. We expect a full announcement with more details to come at a later date.

SNK Heroines features several women from across the SNK catalog of games, as well as Terry Bogard and Skullolady.

Steam reviews have always been kind of a double-edged sword. They’re a powerful way for customers to voice their dissatisfaction with a game, like in the case with Rockstar’s crackdown on Grand Theft Auto V mods getting reversed because of reviews. But it also means that developers can be review bombed by an extremely effective user base, which might have problems with a game beyond game design, such as the recent case with Taiwanese horror game Devotion. Developers have long complained to Valve about the latter problem, which Epic took into account when not having user reviews on their store. That decision may have prompted Valve into today’s announcement of overhauling user reviews on Steam.

In an extremely un-Valvelike move, the company has announced it is doing what it is often incredibly hesitant to do: hire a team of actual humans to do something. When a game gets an anomalous number of reviews at once, Valve dispatches a team of people to investigate the reviews and categorize non-relevant ones as off-topic. Review score went down because the game is broken? That’s relevant. Score went down because the reviewer said something people don’t like on Twitter? Likely off-topic. The thing is, what is determined to be “off-topic” seems broad enough to drive a truck through.

“We define an off-topic review bomb as one where the focus of those reviews is on a topic that we consider unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game,” Valve says.

Valve clarified that some examples they consider when deciding is something is off-topic is complaints about a game’s end-user license agreement or digital rights management. So complaints about DRM like Denuvo slowing down Devil May Cry 5’s framerate would, presumably under Valve’s example, not contribute to its user score.

To be clear, this system does not filter bad reviews one-by-one. The team decides if a game is being review bombed and then declares all reviews within that period of time to be off-topic. That means good and bad reviews, so some might just have the bad luck of writing their praising review during a time where a flood of bad reviews that are irrelevant to the game’s quality came in. But at least humans are deciding it, so there’s more to it than Valve’s usual algorithm-based decision-making.

It remains to be seen how well this new plan will work or how the topics get defined as time goes on.

It seems a war between different types of PC game launchers and storefronts is brewing, though not everyone is eager to signal an intention to fight. While Bethesda has had their own launcher for some time now, the publisher seems willing to back off that idea and bring their games back to Steam with an announcement that their upcoming portfolio and previous notable omissions are heading to Valve’s digital distribution store.

In December, third party sites gave an indication that Rage 2 would not be appearing on Steam by saying keys are only guaranteed to work on the Bethesda launcher. The publisher’s silence, combined with the fact that Fallout 76 skipped Steam, lead people to believe the post-apocalyptic shooter, err, the post-apocalyptic shooter with pink in it would not appear on the store. Not so, says Bethesda. Rage 2 and Doom Eternal will be hitting Steam, as well as Wolfenstein: Youngblood, VR experience Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, and last year’s Fallout 76 will all be on Steam.

Bethesda did not say whether or not the games would also appear on Epic Games Store.

It is also not known why Bethesda made this specific decision. The publisher may have given up their goals for their own launcher, which has taken a lot of criticism over the years. It’s also possible that Valve has begun engaging in the process of securing exclusives for their own service, which Epic has been doing for some time. It seems very unlikely that Epic failed to approach Bethesda with a signed check for their games and Epic Games Store exclusivity, which means Bethesda made their decisions of where to put their games on some other basis.

Rage 2 releases for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on May 14, while Doom Eternal, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot release in 2019.

Today marks the debut of Steam’s chat app on mobile devices. The free app for iOS and Android allows you to take your conversations on the go for a modernized chat experience.

The app includes many features from the desktop client. Valve lists the following:

• Friends List – See who’s in game or online at a glance. Never miss an opportunity to play.
• Rich Chat – Your chats get even better with higher fidelity links, videos, tweets, GIFs, Giphy, Steam emoticons, and more.
• Invite Links – Add new friends on Steam with a link. Generate an invite link you can text or email.
• Customizable Notifications – Mobile notifications mean you’ll never miss a message or game invite. You can customize your notifications per friend, group chat, and chat channel.
• Group Chats – Get everyone on the same page. Groups make it easier to do things like stay in touch with your communities and organize game night with your best friends.

You can check it out for yourself by heading over to the App Store or Google Play.

Valve is also currently working on the inclusion of voice chat for the app. It also confirmed that the original Steam mobile app will receive significant upgrades, primarily centered on account security, from one-touch login to QR codes.

Probably best described as “Mass Effect but with spies,” Obsidian’s Alpha Protocol was divisive on release thanks to a bevy of poor gameplay mechanics and glitches. However, over the years the RPG has earned a cult following thanks to its strong, branching storytelling and emphasis on player choice.

Earlier today curious users noticed that the game was no longer available for purchase on Steam. According to PC Gamer, Sega says that the reason for the delisting is because the company’s rights over the music have expired. It’s not entirely clear what this means for the future of Alpha Protocol’s availability, much less ardent fans’ hopes of a sequel, though Obsidian expressed interest in making a sequel back in 2011.

For more on what Obsidian’s been up to, check out all our features on the company’s upcoming RPG The Outer Worlds.

Every so often, Valve will have a big sale where they gamify the process of buying games and getting discounts. This time, they’re upping the carrot and lessening the stick with a Grand Prix sale. Participating in this season’s summer sale allows a random chance for participants to win a game on their wishlist.

What Valve meant is that participants will win the top game on their wishlist.

What players interpreted, according to developers charting a mass exodus of their cheaper games on player wishlists, is that participants will win a random game on their wishlist.

This caused a problem! Players were thinking that, to maximize the value of what you could win, your wishlist should only include $60 video games that would, under their interpretation of the wishlist rules, be worth more than a cheaper game. This disproportionately hurt indie games, which rely on Steam’s wishlist to alert the rather large userbase to sale prices and just offer them general reminders that they were, at some point, interested in this game. It’s also just useful to know how many people want your game but aren’t buying it for some reason or another.

Shortly after developers noted this egress of their games off wishlists, Valve issued a clarification to explain that winners receive the game at the top of their wishlist. So if you wanted Assassin’s Creed Odyssey rather than Sleeping Dogs because it was newer and costs more, you would just move it to the top of your list.

To make up for the confusion, Valve is giving those who were active on the first day some extra points. So if you participated at all, you get a little leg up in the grand prix. Just don’t remove every game off your wishlist in the meantime. One wonders if the clarifications will be enough, however, or if the damage has already been done. If you keep a number of indie games on your wishlist for a while, and then removed them in a hurried dash to maximize your value from a possible win, are you going to go through the effort of putting them back? It looks like we’ll have to wait and see.

Fantasy Strike, a fighting game that takes a simplified approach to inputs and meters, will release on July 25.

The game has been on Steam’s early access program for some time now, but will have its full release on PC, Mac, and Linux on that date. It’s also launching on PS4 and Switch on that date.

Fantasy Strike’s road to release has been somewhat long. For a breakdown of what to expect from it, you can read our preview of it based on an early version of it from way back in 2016.

EA and Valve are partnering up to put both games and EA Access (EA’s subscription service) on Steam.

The first big drop for this initiative is Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order on Steam, launching on November 15. A glance at the title’s Steam page seems to indicate that users opting in on Steam will still need to have Origin installed, similar to how games like Division 2 direct you through Uplay to play.

UPDATE 10/29/2019: A Reddit post by someone identified as a Respawn Dev on the Apex Legends subreddit has stated that “your games will launch directly with Steam without running Origin.”

Other big titles like Apex Legends and Battlefield V will hit Steam next year. Still want to play on Origin? No problem, you’ll be able to play with Steam users.