Valve now includes a Top Played section on its charts just for the Steam Deck, and to absolutely nobody's surprise, it's rammed full of old favorites, with only a handful of games on the list being able to be described as "recent".
News in brief
- Valve's Top Played for the Steam Deck is a great shopping list
- Elden Ring sits atop the list
- The list shows the Steam Deck is in a great place
If you have a Steam Deck, whether new or old, then this new list from Valve is the best place to find out what you should be playing. Valve is testing a new method of judging playtime for this list, and it combines how many people are playing a game with how much they've been playing it. So it's not just raw numbers from either metric, but a combination of both.
Top of the list in the weekly numbers, to absolutely nobody's surprise, is Elden Ring. The recent release of the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC has catapulted the game back into the spotlight, with a corresponding jump up in playtime. Stardew Valley is a sudden shift in tone for second place, and recent release Balatro finds itself in a well deserved third.
What's interesting is how many of the games in the top ten and further down are much, much older than you might expect. Old favorites like Fallout 4 are sat happily in the top ten, while Baldur's Gate 3 continues to squat happily in most people's most played, finding itself in an apparently eternal position on the list.
Newer games are in the list though, with Hades 2 being a particularly interesting inclusion. According to Valve, despite the game being so new, so many players are playing that it's found itself on the list regardless. Amusingly, the first Hades is also on the list, coming in at number nine. The only new entry in the list is, amusingly, a re-release of a much older game, KINGDOM HEARTS -HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX-. After a period of exclusivity on the Epic Games Store, Kingdom Hearts has finally come to Steam, and it's apparently doing well.
