Baldur's Gate 3 wins again: It was the most-played game on Steam Deck over the past 12 months

Valve has revealed the list of the top 100 most-played games on Steam Deck between March 2023 and March 2024 and it's yet another trophy for Baldur's Gate 3, which claimed the top spot despite only being available for half that time.

The list is sorted by highest daily active player count, and unsurprisingly it's pretty much a rundown of the most popular games on PC over the past year or so: Baldur's Gate 3 sits at the top, followed by Vampire Survivors, Dave the Diver, Hogwarts Legacy, and Elden Ring.

The Steam Deck's most played games are:

There are a few interesting takeaways from the list. The most obvious is that singleplayer games dominate: Palworld bucks the trend in the sixth spot, but otherwise the top 20 is—with partial exceptions for GTA5, RDR2, and Stardew Valley, which all have popular multiplayer modes—singleplayer throughout. All due respect to Pocketpair boss Takuro Mizobe, but I think we can fairly say that multiplayer support isn't essential to ensuring a game's success at all.

Second thing, and this is a little more surprising to me, although I am not at all a mobile gamer: People don't seem to mind playing big games on a small screen. Games like Vampire Survivors, Binding of Isaac, Balatro, and Terraria are natural fits for handheld devices, because they can be played in small bites and glorious 4K graphics don't really matter. 

But Elden Ring? Cyberpunk 2077? Skyrim, Witcher 3, Monster Hunter: World, and Fallout 4? Those are big, chunky games, the kind of things you sit down in front of, start playing, and then whoops, it's 2 am. Their overall popularity notwithstanding, I wouldn't think they'd be quite so in-demand on a system that's designed first and foremost for portability, but clearly I was off-base on that one.

In a similar vein, it also speaks very highly of the Steam Deck that it can handle these things at all. There are a lot of demanding games here and some of them, including Palworld, GTA5, and RDR2, aren't even Steam Deck Verified.