The weekly Steam top-sellers list, issued every Sunday, is back with several surprises and several familiar faces. The two biggest stories of the week being the impressive double placement of open-world racing game Forza Horizon 4, which has been released on Steam for the first time, and the continued success of Valheim, which is once again at the top of the list. Otherwise, there were relatively few significant releases for the week popular enough to shake up Steam's list.
This week's most interesting shift is the addition of Steam's biggest new release of this week, Forza Horizon 4. Forza Horizon 4 originally launched on PC in 2018, but has now been ported to Steam by Microsoft for the very first time. Forza Horizon 4 is popular enough that its taken both second and fifth place on this week's chart, for its standard and deluxe editions respectively. There's also a third Ultimate Edition of Forza Horizon 4 which would be surprising to see just below the top 10.
Ahead of Forza Horizon 4 on the chart, in the number one position, is Valheim. Valheim's success is difficult to exaggerate at this point. The open-world cooperative survival game has been the number one game on Steam for six weeks running now, from the start of February 2021 on. Valheim sold over five million copies in its first month, despite being an Early Access title made by a studio founded in 2019. Valheim's dominance of the Steam charts will come to an end eventually, but it's going to take a bigger competitor than what's new this week.
The only other new game on this week's list is Stronghold: Warlords, self-published by FireFly Studios. It's a massive real-time strategy game based around historic China and Japan, with 31 campaign missions and both online and offline multiplayer. Stronghold: Warlords climbed to the ninth position on this week's chart, a respectable position for a game made for a specific niche of RTS players.
Filling out this week's Steam top-sellers is Loop Hero in the third position, fallen from its second placing last week, and the Valve Index VR Kit now in fourth. Tale of Immortal remains in sixth, holding steady as English gamers hope for a localization. Then there's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - Operation Broken Fang, Middle-earth: Shadow of War Definitive Edition, and Metro Exodus - Gold Edition in seventh, eighth, and tenth respectively.
The next week looks very good for Valheim's continued dominance of Steam's top-sellers. There are some interesting indie games, like the god game Ecosystem, sci-fi strategy game Star Dynasties, and JRPG Saviors of Sapphire Wings, but nothing that's likely to pull Valheim's numbers. Still, 2021 has already been full of surprises on Steam's top-sellers list.
As for Forza Horizon 4, a 2018 game reaching an impressive sales achievement just for jumping to a different storefront is likely to catch notice at Xbox. It's clear that racing game fans are still excited about the kind of experiences the Forza Horizon series offers. Perhaps this will encourage Xbox to comment on rumors that Forza Horizon 5 could be coming in 2021.
Forza Horizon 4 is available now on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.