Steam's Biggest Risers This Autumn: Updates Built the Gains, the Sale Built the Spikes

The games that climbed Steam's player charts this autumn did it in two different ways. Free updates and launches produced the gains that held across a whole month: The Witcher 3's 30-day average is up 90% on August after its Remastered update, and Total War: Warhammer III's September average rose 23% before a single autumn discount. The Steam Autumn Sale, which ran from 1 to 8 October, produced the sharpest spikes instead, led by The Outlast Trials.

This piece is built on Steam's own daily most-played chart (the rollup for 6 October, read through Steam's public charts API), Steam's current-player counts and store prices read at 07:11 UTC on 7 October 2026, monthly averages from SteamCharts, and the developers' own update notes on Steam. Every number below carries its date. We cannot see sales figures, only how many people were playing.

Which games climbed Steam's chart the most this autumn?

Steam ranks games by their daily peak of concurrent players and shows where each one stood a week earlier. In the 6 October rollup, 23 games in the top 100 had either entered the chart or climbed at least four places in seven days. The table below keeps the ten that matter for this story, plus the reason behind each move, taken from developer notes and the store's own discount labels.

Eight of the ten carry a discount of 50% or more, which is the first clue that the sale did most of the week's lifting. The two biggest absolute numbers, though, belong to games that had something new to offer. AION 2's free launch put it straight in at fifth with a daily peak of 383,176, and NC's own Steam notice on 5 October thanked 400,000 active players. Deadlock climbed to sixth a week after Valve's City Never Sleeps update.

Did updates or discounts produce the bigger gains?

A one-day chart position can flatter a game, so the better test is the average across a month. SteamCharts publishes monthly averages built from Steam's own player counts. Comparing the last 30 days (to 7 October) with August, before either the updates or the sale, separates the games that grew from the ones that merely had a busy week.

The Witcher 3 is the clearest update story. CD Projekt Red's free Remastered upgrade went live on 29 September, and the game then set a new all-time Steam peak; SteamCharts now lists 137,043 as the highest point of the past 30 days. Its 30-day average almost doubled against August. The price did not change around the update: our launch-day report found the Complete Edition already 50% off before the upgrade went live, and it stayed at $24.99 through the Autumn Sale. The discount was a constant, not the trigger.

Total War: Warhammer III is the cleaner case, because its climb happened before the sale existed. Creative Assembly's Update 9.0 and the four Lords of the End Times packs landed in late September, and the game's September average was already 23% above August. The 85% discount ($8.99 instead of $59.99) added another 14% on top in the 30-day window.

How big were the Autumn Sale spikes?

Much bigger, in percentage terms, than anything an update managed. The Outlast Trials had a September peak of 6,679 players on SteamCharts; at 90% off it reached 97,463 inside the sale window, more than 14 times higher, and it entered Steam's top 20 without any new content. Its 30-day average still more than doubled on September.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps tells a similar story at a smaller scale. Its last Steam patch dates from November 2020, yet its 30-day average is almost seven times August's, and its peak of 21,554 compares with 1,219 in August. Its climb started in September, before the official sale, and we could not find a documented cause for that earlier rise beyond the discount it now carries. Monster Hunter Rise, also at $3.99, rose from 175th to 100th on the daily chart.

Where do new launches fit in?

Launches are their own category, and this autumn produced one riser and two fallers. AION 2 had already peaked at 171,530 players during its paid early access on 30 September; the free-to-play switch more than doubled that, to a daily peak of 383,176 on 6 October. Free entry removes the price question completely, and no discount on this list came close to that number.

The two most-played launches of late summer went the other way, as launches usually do. WARDOGS, which is not discounted and still costs $39.99, slipped from fifth to eighth on the daily chart, but its 30-day average of 203,921 is only 9% below its September launch month. How to Fish, launched in August, fell much harder: even at 38% off, its 30-day average is 82% below a launch month that averaged 148,647 players. A gentle slide like WARDOGS' is what a healthy launch looks like; the sale games will be judged against that baseline in a fortnight.

Is the 'updates win' argument actually right?

Only partly, and the counter-case deserves a hearing. If the test is the largest jump, the sale wins easily: no update this autumn multiplied a game's peak by 14, as the discount did for The Outlast Trials. A cheap price also reaches lapsed and new players at once, which is exactly what a struggling live-service game needs.

Updates are not a guarantee either. The Witcher 3 slipped from seventh to 14th on the daily chart within a week, while still discounted. How to Fish shipped its first content update, The Islet, on 28 September, and its 30-day average is still 82% below its August launch month.

The sale also failed to lift some of Steam's most famous back catalogue. Cyberpunk 2077 at 70% off is flat against September, Skyrim Special Edition at 90% off is 10% below August, and Left 4 Dead 2 at $1.99 is still under its August level. A discount moves a game when it reaches people who were waiting for it; for games most players already own, it barely registers.

What did the overlap cases show?

Space Marine 2 is the game where the two forces met. Saber and Focus released Anniversary Update 2 (Patch 15.0) on 1 October, the day the Autumn Sale opened, and the game was 75% off when we checked. It climbed from 90th to 58th in a week, and its 30-day average is 15% above August. We cannot split that gain between the patch and the price, and nobody outside Saber can either.

The live counts on the morning of 7 October, still inside the sale, show how far some of these spikes stretch. At 07:11 UTC, a quiet hour for American players, The Outlast Trials had 42,950 people playing, more than four times its 30-day average. The Witcher 3 had 48,972, Total War: Warhammer III 33,492 and Ori 16,482.

What does it mean now that the sale is over?

The sale ended on 8 October at 10am Pacific, according to Steamworks. The prediction this data supports is simple: games that rose on price alone, such as The Outlast Trials and Ori, should fall back the fastest, while Total War: Warhammer III, whose gain began before any discount, should hold more of it. The Witcher 3 sits in between, and its slide from seventh to 14th suggests the remaster bump is already fading.

For players, the practical lesson from our Autumn Sale picks still applies: a busy lobby during a sale is not a promise of a busy lobby a month later. If you bought a multiplayer game for $3.99 during the sale, the next two weeks will show whether its player base sticks.

What we don't know yet

We do not have sales figures for any of these games during the Autumn Sale; Steam does not publish them. The 30-day averages blend sale days with ordinary days, and the post-sale numbers will only be meaningful from the middle of October. We will revisit this list once a full week of post-sale data exists.

Two gaps are worth naming. Deadlock is still invite-only, SteamCharts has no page for it and Steam's API returned no live count, which leaves us with its chart rank and daily peak only. And concurrent players measure attention, not money: a free-to-play launch like AION 2 and a $1.99 Left 4 Dead 2 can post big numbers for very different commercial reasons. Neither the chart nor this article can tell you which of these games actually earned more this autumn.