Revealed: the top new PC and console games of 2024

Published:2024-12-18T09:15 / Source:https://www.polygon.com/analysis/498917/top-pc-console-video-games-of-2024-gamediscoverco

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The GameDiscoverCo newsletter is a regular biz-centric look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s, featuring ‘how they sold millions’ posts, charts, and the latest game discovery & platform news. It’s written by GDCo founder Simon Carless.

We’re here: last stop for 2024, everybody off, the GDCo newsletter is heading to the depot. Before we quit for the annum, massive love to our increasing band of colleagues at GDCo: Alejandro, Avi, Matt, Tomek and Strale – building our game data and info platform right, behind the scenes. (Some exciting news about that in Jan!)

And the other set of people to thank? Why, it’s you! We have over 32,500 GDCo newsletter subscribers – up from 22k at the start of 2024 – and almost 3,000 of you have access to the Plus tier or higher, via individual and company subscription. Our boundless enthusiasm is fueled by yours, and we deeply appreciate the opportunity.

[FINAL BOSS: for EOY, please support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus right now. You get basic access to our ‘core’ Steam data back-end, full access to our second weekly newsletter, our lively – and entertaining – Discord, eight game discovery eBooks & lots more.]

Game discovery news: Fortnite’s new mode trends!

A screenshot of a UI page in Fortnite depicting the top CCU Fortnite islands

Before we get into all the other chart goodness, let’s have a look around the game platform and discovery news since late last week, huh? Here we go go go:

Revealed: top new PC and console games of 2024

A screenshot of Top Cat, the Hanna Barbera cartoon, featuring the titular cat walking out of a building past a doorman

Some of you may recall that at the end of 2023, GameDiscoverCo ran down the top new games of the year across PC and console platforms, according to our large and complex (and fun!) estimation algorithms. Well, we’re back for more in 2024.

Let’s start out with what’s likely the most important platform for the vast majority of game developers in 2024 – Valve’s Steam PC game launcher and store. We’ll have two views for this chart – copies sold and revenue. And here’s ‘copies sold’ for paid games:

A chart made by GameDiscoverCo listing the top new Steam paid games in 2024 (ranked by copies sold), with Black Myth Wukong at the top

Some notes on this intriguing view? There are a few more surprises here than in the upcoming console charts, but:

  • The top three games are the ones you’d expect, in the order you’d expect: that’s Chinese action RPG sensation Black Myth: Wukong, hot everywhere ‘Pokemon recruitment meets survival crafter’ Palworld, and co-op bug blaster Helldivers 2.
  • Plenty of cheaper, cleverer viral sensations crowd the chart: that’d include the masocore multiplayer ‘Only Up!’-inspired Chained Together (#4), ‘cheat to victory’ card game Liar’s Bar (#6), and the newly multiplayer twisted dice game Buckshot Roulette (#10).
  • Path Of Exile 2 is the late-breaking surprise chart entrant: We’re very impressed with ‘paid now, F2P later’ Souls-Diablo-like PoE 2, which already made it to #5, despite only being available for 11 days. (Today’s peak of 437k CCU on Steam is seriously good.)

Also notable in here – the ‘intricate first-person store management sim’ microgenre perfected by Supermarket Simulator (#7) spawned a second similar game in the Top 20, TCG Card Shop Simulator (#16) And there are other, smaller hits like Fast Food Simulator on the way. (This genre is catnip to streamers, in particular.)

Finally, to give you an idea of scale – all of the games in the above chart sold >1 million units on Steam, and further up, 4 of them sold >5 million, and 14 of them >2 million copies. (Over time, they’ll probably sell a lot more than that, of course.)

A list of games created by GameDiscoverCo detailing the top Steam games in 2024 ranked according to gross revenue

We also thought we’d briefly feature the top paid games by gross revenue – which includes IAP/DLC estimates. That is partly why titles like soccer sim EA Sports FC 25 – a rare ‘bigger on console than PC’ title anyhow – shoot up from #14 to #7.

This view also pulls all the inexpensive titles off the charts, and grabs some premium priced, previously ‘just outside the Top 20’ games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Gray Zone Warfare and Farming Simulator 25 into the top list. Makes sense, huh?

Next up, let’s take a look at top new PlayStation paid games of 2024. BTW, we’ve decided to only show ‘# of players’ view here, because the revenue chart doesn’t differ much at all. (Most top PlayStation games are also premium priced.)

A list created by GameDiscoverCo ranking the top new PlayStation paid games of 2024, with EA Sports FC 25 at the top

Some notes on this chart, which we don’t think is unexpected – duh, EA Sports FC & Call Of Duty – but has a couple of small surprises, like the overperformance of Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero (#7):

  • Sports games are half of the Top 10 on PlayStation: there’s plenty of other titles in the mix. But between perennial soccer, basketball, American football, and wrestling games, that’s five of the top worldwide slots used up. (It’s a sports console – at least for new, paid games!)
  • Black Myth: Wukong showed PS5’s ‘hidden’ power in China: we’re estimating >3.5 million Chinese PlayStation players of the cultural sensation, more than 50% of its PlayStation sales. (And they’re all ‘gray market’, by the way.)
  • PlayStation got four of its own titles in the Top 20: those would be Helldivers 2 (#6), The Last Of Us Part II Remastered (#10, with the caveat that there was a $10 upgrade for owners of the original), Astro Bot (#15), and MLB The Show 24 (#17).

Units-wise, we’re estimating all of the above games to have sold >1 million units, with about 11 of them cresting 2 million LTD, and 5 selling >5 million units. That’s some handy context on the general size of the market for the tiptop new titles.

For more platform context: we didn’t do an overall Top 20 by DAU/MAU across all PlayStation games, regardless of age, in 2024. But you would have seen Fortnite, Call Of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V, Roblox and Minecraft as some of the key perennials.

A list created by GameDiscoverCo listing the top new paid games on Xbox for 2024, with EA Sports College Football 25 at the top

Let’s take a look at Xbox! And we’re ignoring Game Pass this year – for which the top 5 new GP games by download # were Palworld, MLB The Show 24, Little Kitty, Big City, Hellblade II and Indiana Jones, btw – and concentrating on paid games. Notes:

  • Xbox consoles are strong in the U.S. – so (American) football wins: who would have bet the top new paid video game of the year on Xbox would be a college football title? (Anybody who knows how fanatical college football fans are!)
  • Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 and Star Wars Outlaws did ‘well’ on Xbox: again, we think it’s down to the US and UK-centric nature of the licenses. But both Space Marine 2 (#5) and Outlaws (#7) – had way closer to a 1:1 ratio between Xbox and PlayStation than other major titles. Both just missed the Top 20 on PS.
  • Game Pass & Xbox console slowdown has made paid games way slower: that’s why you see Suicide Squad (#13) on the list – tho it’s had a 95% off sale. But in general, Xbox’s sales numbers don’t compete with PS/Steam. We see four new games at >1 million units, and 11 at >500k, but #20 is less than 200k units.

Finally, we already printed a bunch of Nintendo Switch charts last month. We didn’t have a chance to update them – probably MySims Cozy Bundle would be the only major new entry, if we did. But here’s the eShop new games chart we had:

An image of a list created by GameDiscoverCo listing the top new Nintendo eShop paid games of 2024, with The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom at the top of the list

And that’s all of our gloriously calculated data. No doubt there’s a glitch or two in here. For example, Call Of Duty is very difficult to estimate due to its uber ‘CoD HQ’ app approach, and there’s gotchas with demo/trial versions of games (Skull & Bones?)

But we’ve done our best. Answers on a postcard if you can see anything we obviously missed or over-rated, and we’ll correct it in the New Year. And thanks for reading the 2024 chart jamboree!

The Game Awards : which games came out on top?

Finally – GDCO’s adorable data packrat* (*we have several!) Alejandro decided to start working on a giant document looking at buzz from The Game Awards 2024 announcements (Google Drive doc). So we crunched data & teamed up with ICO’s great Footprints.gg ‘traditional media’ article tracking service for a second viewpoint.

Before we start – if you’re still trying to pick some of the TGA announcements out of your teeth, so many and complex were they, we liked Skill Up’s 30 minute summary of the whole ceremony (above). (Or if you just need Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets clowning on Geoff Keighley, we’ve got a highlights vid for you too!)

A bar graph created by GameDiscoverCo ranking the game announcements from The Game Awards 2024 that got the most media interest. The Witcher 4 is at the top, followed by Elden Ring Nightreign, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, the Okami sequel, Mafia: The Old Country, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Borderlands 4, Fortnite, Helldivers 2, and Split Fiction

So, our first view (above) of post-awards buzz is simply, according to Footprints.gg, which of TGA’s announcements – even those without any digital store page yet – got the most trad media interest. (It’s tab #3 in the document.) Short notes:

  • The Witcher 4 ‘won’, because duh: the majority of CD Projekt has been working on this action RPG sequel for some time, but good to see it confirmed.
  • Existing IP made up eight of the top ten most-discussed games: that includes the new Elden Ring spinoff, an early in dev Okami sequel, the next Mafia game, the new Onimusha, and Borderlands 4. Phew, sequels!
  • Original IP interest was led by Intergalactic: the next Naughty Dog game – which some wags are joking is its only new IP for the decade – was #3. The other new IP games in the Top 10 – sorta a spiritual sequel – is Split Fiction, from It Take Two’s sweary Josef Fares.
A bar graph by GameDiscoverCo ranking the game announcements at the Game Awards 2024 according to how many Steam wishlist additions they got afterwards. In order, that’s Elden Ring Nightreign, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Blackfrost: The Long Dark 2, Kyora, Split Fiction, Crimson Desert, The Last of Us: Part 2 Remastered, Dispatch, Steel Hunters, and Solasta 2

The other views we’re championing using GameDiscoverCo data are TGA-related games with Steam pages, calculating charts by follower and wishlist increase. (For existing games with DLC, we’re just tracking the main game page.)

That’s in tab #1 and tab #2 in the document, and we’re just doing the ‘Steam follower increase’ chart above. Brief info on it:

  • Elden Ring Nightreign ends up reigning supreme: the unexpected standalone co-op adventure added >40,000 followers and 800,000 Steam wishlists in no time.
  • PC versions of existing PlayStation games keep getting hype: many are excited that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (#2) is finally coming to PC, and similar for The Last Of Us: Part 2 Remastered (#7).
  • Original IP announces are led by Kyora: surprisingly, the multiplayer 2D sandbox from the Core Keeper devs was the 100% original IP title with the most extra followers, post-announce.

There’s also plenty of other notable titles picking up interest here – from survival ‘spiritual successor’ Blackfrost: The Long Dark 2 to superhero workplace comedy (!) Dispatch. Fascinating to see what pops out, huh?

And that’s literally all we have for the year from GameDiscoverCo! We’ll be back in the first full week of January, and have a wonderful – and quiet – holiday. Toodles…

Source:https://www.polygon.com/analysis/498917/top-pc-console-video-games-of-2024-gamediscoverco

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