Unlike the mobile market, tracking downloads and revenue of free-to-play games on PC is nearly impossible due to a lack of data. But discoverability expert Simon Carless has tried to analyze the current state of the F2P segment on Steam.
Summoners War: Chronicles
In a recent GameDiscoverCo newsletter, Carless shared his findings based on a list of the top 30 new free-to-play releases on Steam of the last 12 months, sorted by estimated player count, gross revenue, and other metrics.
“Some of this data is a little ‘experimental and incomplete,” Carless noted. Plus, Call of Duty is missing from the list, as it is hard to split the F2P Warzone from the premium game.
Top 5 free-to-play games by the number of players:
- Overwatch 2— 6.3 million;
- Combat Master: Season 1 — 3.1 million;
- Farlight — 2.6 million;
- Project: Playtime — 2.1 million;
- Stalcraft — 1.8 million.
Top 5 free-to-play games by gross revenue:
- Summoners War: Chronicles — $24.4 million;
- Marvel Snap — $19.3 million;
- Tower of Fantasy — $17.5 million;
- Undecember — $15.2 million;
- Torchlight: Infinite — $11.5 million.
According to Carless, most of the top 10 titles have at least 400k lifetime players. The median is 763k (“1.5-2x as many people added these games to their Steam library, but didn’t play them”). And the median gross revenue is $1.82 million.
The median RpP (revenue per player) is $2.02. There are also exceptions like Magic The Gathering: Arena ($17), Tower Fantasy ($25.2), and Uncharted Waters Origins with a whopping $53.49 (91.6k players, $4.9 million gross).
It is worth noting that most titles in the top 30 have much more successful mobile versions. For example, Marvel Snap has reached over $116 million in revenue on iOS and Android, with $88 million generated in 2023 alone.
For more information on other games, check this Google spreadsheet with the full data.