Steam 2016 Sales Shows Win for Indie

Steam has had an incredibly profitable year. That's to be expected when you dominate the PC game distribution market. And thanks to services like Steam Spy, we can see exactly how well they've been doing. The numbers are in and they look pretty great. It seems Steam brought in nearly $3.5 billion in sales revenue. That's almost 370 million sales.

The figures don't end there. Luckily, we can also see a breakdown for each game. Steam Spy went ahead and built a list of the top 25 games in both copies sold and in revenue earned. A lot of the results were pretty predictable. Civilization VI and GTA V dominate the revenue chart while Counter Strike: GO blows everything else away in copies sold. While those figures aren't surprising, there were a couple of interesting points. Mostly, this has to do with how well a couple of indie titles performed. One of the biggest winners is newcomer Stardew Valley.



Stardew Valley took the 5th spot in copies sold and the 16th spot in revenue. That's impressive considering it had to beat out several AAA titles to get that ranking. More exciting, though, is how Rocket League performed. It got 12th in revenue but 2nd in copies sold. It was only beaten out by CS:GO. And to be honest, that may not be entirely fair. CS:GO sold 6.7 million copies, 4 million more copies than Rocket League's 2.6 million. And remember, Rocket League sold the second most copies all year. Considering that it's one of Valve's babies, it most definitely had a big advantage.

Those aren't the only wins, either. Titles like Undertale, ARK, Terraria, and Dead by Daylight are boasting impressive numbers as well. Even "survival-horror-crafting-open-world" games like The Forest and Rust came out on top.

Say what you will about 2016, but it's definitely shaken up the top games list. If we get more creative, indie titles on future lists, maybe we'll see more innovation in the industry.