Valve may be preparing to merge the Chinese and global versions of Steam. If this happens, many developers will no longer be able to sell games in China without the approval of the local government (now only dozens of foreign titles are licensed per year).Prerequisites for the merger and possible consequences

Party Animals is a new competitive game, the demo version of which has already become a hit on Steam. Even before the official release of the online project, it exceeded 100 thousand people, which became a record for a game developed in China.The Party Animals demo was available for free on Steam from October 4 to October 13.

Marvel’s Avengers has serious problems. The online level of the project dropped below 1000 people, and the players had difficulties with matchmaking. 

Yesterday Baldur’s Gate 3 went into early access and has already shown impressive results. During the day, the peak online project exceeded 70 thousand people, and Larian Studios even joked that they “broke” Steam.

The cooperative VR horror Phasmophobia got into the top ten best-selling Steam games. This is the debut project of the indie studio Kinetic Games, which has only one developer on its staff.

A new GameDataCrunch project has appeared on the network, which collects data about games in one place based on third-party sites and open sources. The service does not provide information about sales, but gives access to metrics by which you can roughly judge the degree of success of different games.Who is behind the project?

The Riftbreaker game from a small Polish studio EXOR was added to the wishlist on Steam almost 250 thousand times before the release. The co-founder of the company, Pawel Lekki, told Gamasutra about how they managed to achieve such impressive indicators.

The influence of the Steam algorithm on the sales and popularity of games periodically causes controversy among developers. Former game designer Simon Carless analyzed the mechanisms of his work, based on direct comments from Valve employees.He was contacted by investor Jason Della Rocca, who recently spoke with Valve about Steam.

Supergiant Games reported that their game Hades has surpassed the mark of 1 million copies sold. The project went out of early access just four days ago, and this short period accounted for 30% of all sales.Information about the achievement appeared on the company’s Twitter.

Among Us continues to set records. The indie project has risen to the eighth place in the list of the most popular games in the history of Steam, beating such hits as GTA V and Destiny 2.According to the GitHyp portal, on September 12, Among Us broke the mark of 304,325 simultaneous players on Steam.

The indie game Among Us became a real phenomenon on Steam only two years after its release. At some point, the developers even wanted to close the project due to unprofitability, but changed their mind in time.Brief chronology

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout continues to collect records. This time, the title received two new achievements at once for the day: on PC and consoles.

After good sales of Persona 4: Golden on Steam, Japanese Sega is going to transfer games to PC much more actively.

Valve has decided to tighten the rules regarding promotion on Steam. Now game developers can promote only Steam versions of their products on the platform.  Other sites cannot be mentioned.

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout continues to set records. Last weekend, the number of simultaneous players on Steam exceeded the figures of many hits of this year, including DOOM Eternal and Sea of Thieves.On August 8, Fall Guys reached 124.7 thousand simultaneous players, according to game analyst Benji-Sales.

Developer Andy Himself plans to release his new project with roguelike elements next year. While you can watch the first gameplay trailer.

Quantic Dream brought the sales of Detroit: Become Human to 5 million copies only after the release on Steam. More than two years have passed since the original release of the project.

The weekly top of the best-selling Steam games was headed by Sea of Thieves. The title has already become the leader of the rating last month.

MAU Epic Games Store jumped to 61 million people. The online peak of 13 million users was also recorded. All this is thanks to the distribution of GTA V.