Eight F2P Games Crack Steam’s Top 100 For 2016

Despite some missteps — No Man’s Sky, anyone? — 2016 was a pretty good year for gaming. But “good” is relative, and we can all claim that Game X did well or Game Y did poorly or that Game Z did better than both of them. Without numbers to back those assertions up, it’s all speculative and open to interpretation.

Fortunately, for the factual-minded among us, Valve did a little bit of legwork to give us some accurate information regarding how well games performed on Steam in 2016. Over the weekend, it released a list of the top 100 highest-grossing games on the platform for 2016, sorted into four descending categories: Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Though games within each category aren’t sorted, and this only counts revenue gained via Steam, these groupings at least give us a little solid info to grade games’ successes this past year.

Out of the 100 games, eight were fully free-to-play:

Platinum: Dota 2
Gold: Warframe, Team Fortress 2
Silver: Smite, War Thunder
Bronze: Knight Online, Tree of Savior, Path of Exile

It should also be noted that Battlerite — currently in paid early access but scheduled for a F2P launch in 2017 — cracked the Bronze tier. Also, both incarnations of the formerly free-to-play H1Z1 made the list — King of the Kill was Gold, while Just Survive was Bronze.

I’m a little surprised to see Team Fortress 2 still maintaining such a high placement on the list. Despite its age, it hasn’t been totally eclipsed by newer hero shooter games. Then again, being a Valve game, it undoubtedly receives 100% of its income from Steam, unlike games like Warframe or Path of Exile, which also have individual client downloads.

Knight Online, though, is a game I wouldn’t have thought to make the list, especially with its 45% positive rating. But sometimes it’s not about how much you’re loved, but how much you can sell; No Man’s Sky is a Platinum game, after all, and it’s probably the least-approved game on the list, at 31%.

Did anything else stand out to you on Valve’s list of highest-grossing games for 2016?