No Man’s Sky has risen again with the release of a new update. However, Hello Games’ survival hit wasn’t the only big winner on Steam over the past seven days.
No Man’s Sky (left), Norland (right)
Counter-Strike 2 dethroned PUBG to become the highest-grossing product on Steam for the week of July 16-23. Other titles in the top 5 were also free-to-play games: The First Descendant remained at #3, followed by Dota 2.
No Man’s Sky returned to the Steam charts at #9 overall (#3 when only looking at premium titles) thanks to a 60% discount and the free World Part 1 update. It overhauled the planet generation system, while also introducing new biomes, creatures, dynamic weather effects, and more.
As a result, No Man’s Sky peaked at 48,596 concurrent players on July 21 (via SteamDB) — the highest CCU the game has seen since August 2019, when Hello Games released the Beyond update.
Elden Ring remained the highest-grossing premium game on the chart, with Dead by Daylight jumping 20 positions to 2nd place (8th when including free-to-play titles) thanks to its collaboration with Tomb Raider.
Below are the top 10 premium games by gross revenue for the week of July 16-23 (excluding F2P titles and Steam Deck):
- Elden Ring
- Dead by Daylight
- No Man’s Sky
- Rust
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree
- Norland
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Chained Together
Top 20 highest-grossing products on Steam, including F2P titles and Steam Deck, for the week of July 16-23 (via SteamDB)
One of the strongest debuts last week was Norland, a medieval kingdom sim / Rimworld-meets-Crusader Kings strategy game from UK indie studio Long Jaunt. It received generally positive reviews from players (72% rating on Steam), also peaking at 11,866 concurrent players and landing at #16 overall (#7 among premium titles).
It is also the second huge success for publisher Hooded Horse this year, following the launch of Slavic Magic’s strategy game Manor Lords. It peaked at over 173k CCU at launch and sold over 2 million copies globally.
Looking at other new titles on the chart, pre-orders for EA Sports FC 25 landed at #33 overall, followed by Critical Hit Games’ noir detective game Nobody Wants to Die (#34), Veom Studio’s lunar base sim The Crust (#53), and Capcom’s action strategy title Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess (#55).