Valve has replaced the Steam stats page with a new Steam Charts section that offers a look at the top selling and most played games on the marketplace.

It's a notable shift for anyone with an eye for metrics, with the new section featuring real-time charts for top selling and most played games, alongside weekly top sellers and monthly top new releases.

Valve said the overhaul will "provide a better overview for what is hot on Steam right now" and explained the new top selling lists rank games based on total revenue, including all sources such as DLC and in-game transactions, to deliver a "more complete view" of what games the Steam community is lapping up.

"This new method of calculating revenue is also being deployed across various top lists throughout the Steam store, including the Top Sellers tab on Steam's homepage, genre and tag pages," added the company.

Building up Steam

Offering a more detailed look at its new charts, Valve explained the "overview" page will serve up a quick summary of which games are selling well, being played the most, and how many Steam users are online at any given moment.

The real-time top sellers section attempts to improve on Steam's existing lists, which have been available on various pages across the platform for over a decade, by indicating how many weeks a game has been on the chart,  when a title has changed position week-on-week, charting releases based on revenue, and allowing users to tailor the list to generate a country-specific top sellers rundown.

For instance, the screenshot below (taken today) shows that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II has moved into the top spot from 19th position based on pre-purchase revenue, and has been on the chart for 10 weeks.

As the name indicates, the real-time most played list tracks the top 100 games based on the number of current players, and also provides a look at how each ranked title is priced and recent concurrent user peaks.

The new weekly top sellers charts tracks the top 100 best-selling games based on revenue earned across each week starting on Monday at 10am PT. "These lists show how many weeks in a row each game has been on the weekly charts and any change in rank from the previous week," added Valve.

"You can easily view previous weeks' charts to see popular games you may have missed. In fact, if you keep going through previous weeks, you can step all the way back to 2005 when there was a grand total of three games available for sale on Steam."

Addressing why it chose to include freemium releases on the new charts, Valve said that although its top sellers lists have traditionally only included revenue from premium releases, that decision had started to obscure the "hugely popular free or inexpensive games in which players purchase season passes, huge expansions, or other forms of new content."

As for what will happen to a game that has been retired or delisted, the company noted that it will remain on the historical weekly and monthly charts to reflect when it was a top selling title in the past.

You can visit the Steam Community blog for more information on Valve's overhauled Steam metrics.