Steam Game Charts: U Mad?

This is some kind of sick joke, isn't it?

1. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

You all did this to spite me, didn't you? You all got together and said, "hey, how can we make Alec lose the last vestiges of his sanity?" I guess it was either getting CSGO to number one in order to force me to keep including it in this regular feature for an eternity or killing my cat. Well, it's not going to work. I held my mind together and soberly tried to ascertain exactly why it was that CSGO has made its way to the very top of this chart. No sale, no major update. As far as I can tell, it's a combination of the second season of ELEAGUE airing on TBS and a surprise banhammer being dropped on several thousand cheaters, thus potentially spurring a wave of replacement accounts.

And stay the hell away from my cat.

2. Divinity: Original Sin 2

Pretty good going for an early access game. The paradoxically-named Original Sin 2 is the follow-up to an RPG no-one realistically expected to punch as hard as it did, and it seems there's an enormous appetite for more. It's a heckuvan achievement for devs Larian, who've been plugging away at their Divinity series for 14 years with mixed results and now get to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the biggest names around.

3. Mad Max

Heyo, this is a nice surprise, given the usual miserably unchanging state of this top ten. Avalanche's Fury Road semi-tie-in is the quintessential noughties 7/10 action game rethought for the sandbox-hungry world of 2015/6, and it's a damned good time despite some underwhelming and even iffy characterisation. Fast Spiky Cars In Giant Endless Desert is hard to argue with, and Avalanche applied their trademark super-destructive verve to it. It's in the charts cos of a sale, of course. A frankly ridiculous one - it was down to $10/£8 for three days last week, which sadly is no longer the case.

4. NBA 2K17

??Basket-to-ball??

5. ARK: Scorched Earth - Expansion Pack

The ARK expansion pack has been blackballed by each and every ARK player due to outrage about charging for extra content for a game that's still in early access. As such, not a single person has bought Scorched Earth and it is a catastrophic commercial failure.

6. Grand Theft Auto V

Attend Favor Thug

Vagrant Tufted Ho

Verdant Fat Tough

Graved That Futon

Daft Tat Hungover

Tartan Fudge Oh TV

7. Rocket League

Only here because it was discounted to 20p until the very second that you read these words, and you missed it because you're A MASSIVE LOSER.

8. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Game of the Year Edition

Looks like Warners did a Good 7/10 Action Game Sale last week. The clever-but-stupid Uruk-slasher that would have had JRR screaming in his grave was down to a pre-tay cray-zay $7.49 for half of last week.

9. Batman: Arkham Knight

I'd have liked this if it could have been embraced as a Good 7/10 Action Game and not some kind of second coming, cos Jeez, it's a hot mess of familiarity and ideas and fanservice and ridic. walking-Batmobile-based puzzle-solving. I just couldn't take it entirely seriously, but if I'd gone into it expecting that to be the case, I might just have dug it. And, of course, there were all the technical problems on PC, many of which were ultimately just shrugged off by the publisher. Despite all the OUTRAGE, there's a whole mass of people still wanting to play it, and at $10 for half of last week, it seemed the price was finally right.

10. Everspace

They try to write the name all in capitals, but nope, sure ain't doing that. evarSp@cE ain't bad, though. It's a very pop space-shooter without much in the way of the simulation and nothing in the way of trading or questing - more comparable to Descent In Space than the full-on spaceship 'em ups the screenshots might suggest. Lightweight and a bit repetitive in its current form, as I wrote about in more depth yesterday, but it's early days in early access, and hopefully its top-selling status means the devs can take it to more interesting places.

Additional notes:

- To the people last week who suggested I make this a top 20 in order to spare us all from the same games repeating, unfortunately that data is not made available by Steam. I can look into it, but you know what they say about blood and stones.

- The people who suggest this article is accompanied by a top 10 itch games piece: that is a good idea. Not sure we have the editorial bandwidth for at this moment in time, but it is definitely Going On The List.

Look ma, no GIFs!