The best selling Steam games, and most played games, of 2021

As 2021 draws to a close, Valve has published Steam’s annual best of lists, revealing this year’s top sellers, top new releases, most-played games, and more. Valve’s data shows that many of Steam’s most popular games on any given day, including nearly decade-old titles like Global Offensive Counter-StrikeAnd Grand Theft Auto 5Continue to outsell the PC platform and to be enjoyed more than any new players.

Each list from Valve’s end-of-year wrap-up contains a handful of games with their orders randomly listed, so it’s not clear which individual game was the best-selling or most-played in a particular category. The top 12 games are the platinum tier, while the Gold-tier games rank 13-24. Bronze tier games rank 41-100, and silver games ranks 25-40. These lists are based on internal Valve data that began Jan. 1, 2021, and ended Dec. 15, 20,21.

The most important item on Steam’s best of 2021 list is the top sellers, letting players know what the most successful games of the year were. In a random order, Valve selected the Platinum-tier 2021 Top Selling Games.

Valve highlighted some repeat offenders in a blog posting. Dota 2, CS:GOAnd GTA5All of them have been on the Top Sellers List for Six Years Running. Battlegrounds in PUBGAnd Rainbow Six SiegeEverybody is now on the top five for the fifth consecutive year. Destiny 2 has made the list three years running, with 2019 being its first year on Steam after moving off of Blizzard’s Battle.net.

The list also includes a handful of first winners. New games like Battlefield 2042, New WorldAnd Valheim All grace the list. Apex LegendsIt is notable because it’s a non-2021 title that debuted on Steam late last year.

The category of new releases highlights 25 top games for the year. In random order, Valve has selected the Platinum-tier 2021 Best New Releases.

Valve offered an analysis of when new releases have appeared in the past year, as well as a comparison to 2020. The last year saw a solid March, with some strong fall months. It was somewhat less regular in 2021, which saw three large months that had four or five new entrants per month: May, September, November.

Finally, we’ll look at the most-played games on Steam, which is broken into multiple categories by concurrent players. Below are the 2021 games which had more than 200,000 concurrent gamers, as sorted by Valve.

• Global Offensive Counter-Strike
• New World
• Dota 2
• Valheim
• Battlegrounds in PUBG
• Apex Legends
• Halo Infinite
• Rust
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Grand Theft Auto 5

Many of these games appeared on last year’s list, including Dota 2, GTA5, PUBGAnd CS:GO. Rust This is an alumni of the 100,000 list, making it a better 2020 than 2020.

Several of last year’s 200K games have also fallen to lower categories. Destiny 2And There are many of usAfter being on the list for the most part last year, the team fell to the 100K range in 2021. 2020 200K video game Terraria The list dropped to 60K. Monster Hunter: WorldAnother popular game,, has fallen to 30K. The Strangest Thing in Life 2And Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, both 200K games in 2020, don’t appear anywhere on the most-played games of 2021.

The best of 2021 Steam list also offers some additional categories we won’t list out here. If you’re interested in top early access graduates, top-selling VR games, and top controller games, you can check out Valve’s official blog post.