ALL THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF PC GAMES

News

More than half of January's top Steam sellers were made in Asia

More than half of January's top Steam sellers were made in Asia

Over 50 per cent of the Top 20 selling games that launched on Steam in January were made in Asia.

That's according to Valve's monthly report, which shows that eight titles were made by Japanese studios, including Dragon Ball Z, Altelier, Utawarerumono and Super Robot Wars. More than half of these titles also launched without English localisation at launch, which is surprising given how large the audience for this language is at launch. That being said, at the start of 2020, it was revealed that Simplified Chinese was the most popular language on Steam, going off data from Valve's most recent hardware survey. 

Meanwhile, China had two titles in the Top 20; Sans of Salzaar and Paranormal HK, while South Korea's Talesshop released Some Some Convenience Store, while Studio 8 rolled out Astellia

Valve does point out that these strong sales might in part be due to Lunar New Year in China, which took place during January and also was the subject of a sales event on Steam.

"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," Valve wrote.

"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."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.