Cool data visualization shows the top 15 most-played Steam games over four years

Who doesn’t love a good graph? Okay, well, I do at least. Here’s one that shows the top 15 most-played games on Steam per day, and you can see the trends that have come and gone, and the ones that have stuck around over the last few years. The chart begins in January 2015 and runs through December 2018. While the games on the chart are constantly shifting, the top two slots are pretty consistent for the first couple years: Naturally, those go to Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Those two games remained in the top positions on the Steam charts all the way until late August, 2017, which is when something peculiar happened. Well, maybe not peculiar. But that’s when PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds really got big. PUBG had launched in Early Access in March of 2017, but it wasn’t until a couple months later that it blew up, becoming the hottest thing in gaming for a while. A few other games that show up regularly include Team Fortress 2, Civilization V, Skyrim, and Warframe. Fallout 4 and Monster Hunter: World both make appearances, and you usually can find one of the Football Managers on there.