Steam reveals the best-selling VR games for 2022
Just in time for the end of the year, Valve announces the most successful Steam titles. Which PC VR games made it into the top 100 in 2022?
When announcing the Steam annual charts, Valve doesn't mention sales or revenue figures. Instead, the top titles of 2022 based on total sales land in four categories: Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. They divide the places from 1 to 90 as follows:
- Platinum: 1st - 12th place
- Gold: 13th - 24th place
- Silver: 25th - 50th place
- Bronze: 51st - 100th place
The list includes only VR-exclusive titles and stand-alone VR ports like Skyrim VR. Games that support both virtual reality and monitors, such as No Man's Sky or F1 22, are not included.
The order of the titles within the categories is random. Only the period from January 1 to December 18, 2022 is considered.
Bonelab and Zenith are SteamVR top sellers this year
Last year, the Platinum category of VR games featured almost exclusively long-running titles like Beat Saber, which is back again this time around. In 2022, however, a few new releases also made enough sales to show up in the Platinum category. These include the physics shooter with mod support Bonelab, the action-packed co-op shooter After the Fall, and the online role-playing game Zenith.
VTOL is an old acquaintance: The military flight game left Early Access in 2020 and has received numerous updates since then. The survival shooter Into the Radius made it into the Platinum category for the second time after 2021. It moved from Early Access to the full version in 2020.
The Platinum Category 2022. | Image: Valve
Legacy best-sellers in the Platinum category in 2022 include shooter classics like Superhot VR, Half-Life: Alyx, and Pavlov. The latter have been repeatedly supplied with mods.
This time, however, no game from 2022 is represented in the Gold category, which speaks against a lively PC VR market. The category is dominated by older titles, such as the shooter Onward, Fallout 4 VR, and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners (still reached Platinum in 2021).
The most recent two Gold games already launched in 2021, namely Cooking Simulator VR and the co-op swordfight Legendary Tales. The silver category is more up-to-date: There you will find the games Among Us VR, the survival adventure Green Hell, and the graphically impressive Kayak VR: Mirage, which were released in 2022.
No VR game among Steam's top sellers?
VR games are not represented in the general Steam bestseller category: Not a single pure VR title made it into this top list. Even Half-Life: Alyx slipped out of the bronze category this year.
Instead, only a handful of games with optional VR modes show up there. These include the war game War Thunder (Gold), the co-op horror Phasmophobia (Silver), the racing game F1 22 (Bronze), and Microsoft Flight Simulator (Bronze).
In an accompanying sale, Steam's top sellers are available for up to 76 percent off. The offer ends on January 5.
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