Steam Sale Surges: The games that popped-off during the during Steam’s Summer Sale

Steam Sales can be the perfect chance to find a your new favorite game, the bane of your wallet, a threat to your very financial security. But to developers, they’re also the chance for your game to go viral and explode in a way many may not have ever thought possible. That’s what happened to several games during the Steam Summer Sale 2023 that went from niche titles to overnight stars. Here’s five games that popped off during the Steam Summer Sale 2023:

We’re sorry, we fibbed a bit. This first one isn’t technically a game. It’s more of a companion app. Remember Bonzi Buddy? Remember the promise of a cute pal for your desktop? Well TaskPals actually delivers that without any of the malware or identity theft. Choose from eight cute pets that will come and live on your Windows taskbar. Its an adorable little app, and it’s free, although you can pay a few dollars to support the development! 

Anyway, TaskPals surged as it started getting suggested during the Steam Sale. It’s gone from around 1,000 players to almost 3k overnight, and we’ve downloaded it as well! Thoroughly recommended

Tower defense games are a guilty pleasure of many gamers, with their origins harking back to WarCraft III custom maps and online Flash games. The Perfect Tower II is kind of the most distilled tower defense experience you can find. The enemies are cubes, the tower is made of cubes, and it's so simple and stylized you can’t really find anything to dislike. 

Another free game, what this needed was just to get in front of people’s faces. And thanks to the Steam Sale it did! It’s jumped from a few hundred to almost 4.5k in a matter of days.

If we said that there's a MMOFPS Minecraft-style game based in the Chernobyl Exclusion zone, you’d probably think we’d installed too many mods on our private server, and should probably go to bed. But that’s exactly what STALCRAFT is! Cribbing heavily from the likes of the Stalker and Metro games, STALCRAFT adds slightly more low-poly and blocky art-style to the genre, but keeps the tension, horror, and survival elements.

Launching in December 2022, STALCRAFT has exploded in popularity both due to the Steam Sale and a surge of over 10k Twitch viewers tuning into STALCRAFT streams. Its a testament to how streaming can help a game get noticed!

We can’t hide the bias here, we love this game. Halls of Torment is a Vampire Survivors clone, but with an art style based off the isometric stylings of the original Diablo. We’re smitten with this game. It looks so nostalgic, from the little blood-filled health pot in the bottom left corner, to the pixelated skeletons coming to kill you. It’s like stepping into an alternate dimension where this is how the Diablo franchise evolved. 

The timing couldn’t have been better for Halls of Torment. The sale came just as streamer Asmongold started playing it. Already a steal at $5, the sale took 20% off the price and it flew off the metaphorical shelves. The game has peaked at 26,000 players, with no signs of letting off. What’s more, over 30,000 people are watching it on Twitch. It’s gone viral in a very real way!

The biggest winner of the Steam Sale 2023 isn’t Halls of Torment though, it’s DAVE THE DIVER. Released a day before the Steam Sale started, the game has perfectly capitalized on players looking for their casual game fix. DAVE THE DIVER feels a bit like if Stardew Valley was about a rotund beared man who hangs around on the beach all day doing odd jobs. It’s got a delightful pixel art style, a cast of colorful characters, and it won’t break the bank. 

What’s more, it flew into the top-10 most played games on Steam this week after surviving to 98,480 concurrent players on July 9. There was some Twitch and other streaming support for this one, but largely, this has been the sale carrying the weight. A great little game to enjoy!

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