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Valve is once again offering fans a look at the best new releases on Steam for the preceding month. That month is, you guessed it, the month of January 2020. Once again, Valve has limited the list of "top releases" for the month to those games that were actually released in January 2020.
Before we take a look at those games, Valve included a special bonus treat for us. The studio dove deep into their archives to show us what people were playing ten years ago. These are the top Steam games for January 2010:
- Wings of Prey
- Zero Gear
- Gothic II: Gold Edition
- Greed: Black Border
- Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy
- Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000
- Dark Void
- Bob Came in Pieces
- Hotel Giant 2
- Mass Effect 2
- Toki Tori
Back in the here and now, the top Steam releases for January 2020 were another mixed bag of genres. Horror fans quickly flocked to Paranormal HK while VR fans have been enjoying the spectacular The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.
Temtem also made big waves in January 2020. This is about as PC players will probably ever get to a Pokemon MMO. Heck, it might even be the closest that Nintendo fans will ever get to a Pokemon MMO. It's certainly doing some things very right because it hit Steam's top sellers despite being an Early Access release.
There are plenty of additional games to check out. Valve even tossed up a special "sale" page featuring all of January's top selling new releases. Just keep in mind that these games may not actually be on sale. It's more so a special landing page so that you can see all of the games in one spot, even if the new blog entry already does the same thing.
Before wrapping this up, we will share what Valve wrote in this month's recap about how game development is global. This is especially relevant this month since a few of the top sellers come from China, some of them come from Japan, and some from the United States. Other games included came from Russia, Canada, Korea, Spain, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Australia, and even Indonesia.
Game development is global
If you've followed our previous posts, you know that we like to highlight the developers who are creating these awesome products. Every month, it's remarkable to see how diverse the representation of developers is from around the world. In the past six months alone, top releases were developed in more than 30 different countries across six continents. This diversity ensures that no matter where players live, it's easy to find games with familiar language use, regional pop culture references, local themes & settings and all sorts of other variety that simply wouldn't exist if developers were all from one region. January's new releases brought a surprising amount of content from one region in particular. More than half of January's top releases were developed in Asia, with eight titles coming from Japanese development teams.
The prevalence of Asian products in January likely comes from a huge variety of factors: change in geographical spending, impact of the Lunar New Year holiday, differences in developer release schedules, and certainly a bit of coincidence. The most exciting part of this surge comes when looking at the products themselves. Anime themes and JRPG elements often perform well with players on Steam, and January included six products from classic anime franchises - Dragon Ball Z, Atelier (3), Utawarerumono and Super Robot Wars. Another exciting thing about these top titles was that almost half of them launched without English localization for either audio or text. Not too long ago, including English support at launch was a requirement for success on Steam. English-speakers are still a huge part of Steam's audience, but the success of January's top releases reinforces the fact that now, more than ever, Steam players come from all over the world and will support a huge variety of language options.
If you've followed our previous posts, you know that we like to highlight the developers who are creating these awesome products. Every month, it's remarkable to see how diverse the representation of developers is from around the world. In the past six months alone, top releases were developed in more than 30 different countries across six continents. This diversity ensures that no matter where players live, it's easy to find games with familiar language use, regional pop culture references, local themes & settings and all sorts of other variety that simply wouldn't exist if developers were all from one region. January's new releases brought a surprising amount of content from one region in particular. More than half of January's top releases were developed in Asia, with eight titles coming from Japanese development teams.
The prevalence of Asian products in January likely comes from a huge variety of factors: change in geographical spending, impact of the Lunar New Year holiday, differences in developer release schedules, and certainly a bit of coincidence. The most exciting part of this surge comes when looking at the products themselves. Anime themes and JRPG elements often perform well with players on Steam, and January included six products from classic anime franchises - Dragon Ball Z, Atelier (3), Utawarerumono and Super Robot Wars. Another exciting thing about these top titles was that almost half of them launched without English localization for either audio or text. Not too long ago, including English support at launch was a requirement for success on Steam. English-speakers are still a huge part of Steam's audience, but the success of January's top releases reinforces the fact that now, more than ever, Steam players come from all over the world and will support a huge variety of language options.
