So I looked at the top 100 best rated games released on Steam during 2024, and I saw some interesting trends.
First, only two games were AAA titles. They were Black Myth: Wukong and SONIC X SHADOW GENERATIONS. And even then, I'm being a little bit charitable by calling the latter title an AAA game.
As for everything else? Budget title indies. Most titles were priced under $30. And 22 of them were free -- not "free with in-app purchases", but simply free.
The other trend is that few of these games got press attention even though, in a lot of cases, they had a large playerbase.
Case in point: the highest rated game on Steam is MiSide which has a 97% positive rating based on 87,019 reviews. I checked news archives and MiSide hardly got any mentions from the gaming press. No mentions on GameSpot, IGN, or PC Gamer. How did gaming journalists miss out on the highest rated game of 2024?
But the most surprising trend is that the bulk of the 100 highest rated games on Steam are PC exclusives. As much as people say we are living in a post-platform world this is simply not the case. For instance, only 2 of the top 10 Steam games of 2024 got a multi-platform release -- Balatro and Black Myth: Wukong.
You would think a beloved game like Satisfactory would already arrive on PS5 or Xbox Series X|S, but after six years of development, it is still PC-only. Now to be fair, Satisfactory is supposed to arrive on consoles. But that game has been on Early Access for PC since 2019 -- and there's no firm release date for console versions.
There are three takeaways here: price does not indicate quality, don't believe the hype, and exclusives still matter.
https://steamdb.info/stats/gameratings/2024/?displayOnly=Game&sort=rating_desc
It's up to the community to make these games go viral. Most games in my library were under 15€ on sale and I don't think I have a single "AAA" title in there. They are just pricey, require expensive hardware and are most likely all hype. It shouldn't have been a surprise that most players can't afford that shit.
To me, this list is just yet another confirmation that game media like the one you mentioned is just paid and unoriginal. They ride a wave to get clicks, that's it.
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