5 Surprising Things We Learned From Valve’s Steam Game Sales Leak

Batman and Guardians of the Galaxy Are Two of Telltale’s Poorest Performers

Telltale has produced some memorable narrative adventure games of the years, and its adaptations of two popular comic-book licenses, DC’s Batman, and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy were critically acclaimed on release. Yet they don’t appear to have performed particularly well on Steam according to Valve’s recently leaked data, in which the player counts for over 13,000 games were revealed (accurate as of July 1, 2018).

Below are the figures for all Telltale’s games listed:

• The Walking Dead – 2,846,244
• The Walking Dead: Season 2 – 1,054,661
• The Wolf Among Us – 1,011,210
• Game of Thrones – 598,965
• Tales from the Borderlands – 592,856
• Minecraft: Story Mode – A Telltale Games Series – 346,763
• The Walking Dead: A New Frontier – 278,042
• Batman – The Telltale Series – 272,720
• The Walking Dead: Michonne – A Telltale Miniseries – 197,450 
• Batman: The Enemy Within – The Telltale Series – 80,154
• Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series – 69,783

Despite superheroes being very much in vogue at the box office, that doesn’t seem to have translated to success for Telltale —at least not on PC via Steam. Although the first season of Batman appears to have gained some pretty decent traction, the subsequent The Enemy Within, and especially Guardians of the Galaxy, underwhelmed.

Other interesting takeaways include the success of Game of Thrones, which has one of the lowest Metacritic averages of any of Telltale’s series. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised given the immense popularity of the franchise, but we should certainly expect to see more seasons moving forward given its notable player count.

Wolfenstein II The New Colossus Really Didn’t Do Well

Having launched on the same day as Assassin’s Creed Origins and Super Mario Odyssey, Wolfenstein II The New Colossus was always likely to have a tough time garnering a substantial audience outside its fan base. And when it went on sale for just half the original price only a month later, things looked bad. NPD later confirmed the sluggish start, and the leaked Steam data suggests the pace never recovered. Wolfenstein II The New Colossus recorded just 549,457 players as of July 1, 2018 —over a million less than its predecessor. For additional context, that’s less than the DLC for The New Order, The Old Blood, or Prey —another Bethesda-published shooter that failed to impress at retail.

Here’s a breakdown of player counts for Bethesda-published titles in recent years as recorded by Steam:

• DOOM – 3,197,626
• Wolfenstein: The New Order – 1,819,928
• Prey – 704,179
• Wolfenstein: The Old Blood – 600,610
• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus – 549,457
• The Evil Within 2 – 227,653

Perhaps GoG and console sales made up a decent proportion of sales outside of Steam, but there’s no doubt that The New Colossus’s sales are disproportionately low in comparison to the other titles listed above —particularly so, considering its immense critical reception.

The Witcher 3 Might Have Outsold Fallout 4 on PC

Last year, Vice President of Bethesda Pete Hines stated that Fallout 4 was the studio’s best-selling game of all time. It was a surprising revelation given Skyrim’s well-known popularity, and it now seems clear that Hines was referring to the two titles compared over the same time since Skyrim clearly eclipses Fallout 4 for sales on Steam according to the leak. There’s another interesting revelation, though: The Witcher 3 might have actually outsold Fallout 4 on PC.

Although the leak lists The Witcher 3 at over a million less in player estimates, that obviously doesn’t take into account a huge proportion of PC players who purchased the game via GoG. Okay, we’re guessing here slightly, but here’s the thing: back in 2015, CD Projekt Red stated that 690,000 PC players had opted to purchase the game via GoG. That suddenly makes things much closer, and since that was three years ago and Fallout 4 isn’t on GoG, you’d have to imagine The Witcher 3 might well have pulled ahead.

If that is the case, the notion that The Witcher 3, a relatively niche series prior to the third installment, has outsold what was one of the most hotly anticipated sequels to one video gaming’s most iconic franchises in Fallout 4 (a PC-centric franchise, nonetheless) is pretty astounding.

• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – 13,235,488
• Fallout 4 – 6,601,188
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – 5,479,626 + 693,000 (GoG as of June 12, 2015)
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition – 4,398,897

Deus Ex Mankind Divided Ditched by SE Despite Fairly Strong Numbers

It’s fair to say the Deus Ex franchise is a massive name in the video gaming industry. A seminal PC game back in the early 2000s, then wonderfully rebooted by Eidos Montreal back in 2011, it’s a name that has been synonymous with quality first-person RPGs for many years. The most recent entry in the series, however, didn’t quite reach the same dizzying heights as its predecessors. It felt restricted in scope and unfinished, with a narrative that teed up an interesting premise without truly delivering a satisfying conclusion. Rumors swirled that publishing decisions had shackled the studio’s original vision, which made the later report that the franchise had been put on ice all the more upsetting.

When Valve’s Steam data leaked, it was one of the first numbers we were interested in shedding some light on, expecting confirmation of its dire performance. Strangely, though, it doesn’t seem to have done too badly at all. With 1,155,405 players on PC alone, we’re wondering just how many sales Square Enix needed to see before declaring the title not worth an immediate follow-up. Surely, Deus Ex Mankind Divided has sold well north of two million copies with console sales included —which doesn’t seem like a dead loss to us.

Does this suggest that rumors of poor resource allocation, specifically over-spending on the game’s marketing budget with elaborate live-action trailers led to an unrealistically high number of copies sold to make bank? We’ll likely never know, but it does seem as though Deus Ex Mankind Divided didn’t actually record low numbers in comparison to many other other single-player games. Here’s some other games listed for comparison:

• Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain – 1,750,593
• Dishonored 2 – 1,127,089
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – 1,155,405
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director’s Cut – 1,358,070
• Assassin’s Creed Origins – 1,030,581
• Resident Evil 5/ Biohazard 5 – 1,005,089
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War – 952,284

Call of Duty WW2 Sells Better than Infinite Warfare, But Not Significantly

Call of Duty is an absolute monster of a video game franchise, but its popularity has arguably begun to wane somewhat in recent years. The annual release strategy that yielded consistent results for Activision for years seems to have slowly given way to a fatigue of what feels like an aging blueprint. In an effort to shake things up, Call of Duty returned to its WW2 roots last year for the first time since the beloved Modern Warfare took the series into a more contemporary —and later futuristic— direction back in 2007. Activision later validated that decision by speaking very positively of the commercial numbers earned by WW2, which was claimed to have recorded twice the numbers of Infinite Warfare. The numbers listed in the leaked Steam data won’t impress you as much as you might think, though.

Call of Duty: WW2 has only marginally outsold the lifetime sales of Infinite Warfare. Sure, it has been on the market for a year less, during which time Infinite Warfare has likely been on sale, but the numbers aren’t nearly as drastic as Activision’s claims would suggest. We’re sure that console sales must have contributed hugely to the tally, but the PC audience on Steam doesn’t suggest WW2 has the series back on track in any drastic sense. It has a very long way to go if it’s ever to get anywhere near the series’ best-selling entries on Steam. Take a look at the data below:

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – 5,267,226
• Call of Duty: Black Ops – 3,759,377
• Call of Duty: Black Ops III – 3,021,623
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II – 2,998,561
• Call of Duty: Ghosts – 1,424,741
• Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare – Gold Edition – 1,123,642
• Call of Duty: WWII – 891,381
• Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare – 869,560