Curated playlist
Video games with Steam Workshop support
- Dota 2A month before its official launch in 2013, Dota 2 already had nearly 330,000 people playing at the same moment on Steam. That crowd outnumbered the players in the rest of the platform's top ten games combined. Dota 2 is a Valve game in…
- Portal 2Adam Foster, a Valve employee, ran a bulletin board from his own home phone line. Valve's offices were too modern to support the old protocol. The board served ASCII pictures and scraps of Aperture Science documents to curious players.…
- The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimA modder made Falskaar for Skyrim as a job application to Bethesda. Bungie hired him instead.
- Half-Life 2Half-Life 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter from Valve Corporation, and it cost 40 million US dollars to make. Development lasted five years. By 2011 it had sold 12 million copies worldwide. In November 2024, twenty years after its release,…
- Age of Empires IIOutside Microsoft's offices in South Korea, street sellers once offered pirated copies of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings. The 1999 real-time strategy game, built by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft, had leaked in unfinished…
- Call of Duty: Black Ops IIICall of Duty: Black Ops III, the 2015 shooter from the studio Treyarch, was built by a team that once looked at its own progress and saw almost nothing. In March 2026, creative director Jason Blundell recalled that moment. When the…
- Final Fantasy XVFinal Fantasy XV shipped five million units in one day. Square Enix said that covered its development costs.
- Team Fortress 2Team Fortress 2 drew 253,997 players at the same moment after a 2023 update, the highest count in its history. That figure is remarkable for a Valve multiplayer shooter that had already been on sale for a long time. The road to that peak…
- Age of MythologyAge of Mythology dropped real history for Zeus, Ra and Odin. Ensemble Studios feared becoming stale and repetitive.
- TerrariaTerraria sold more than 50,000 copies on its first day in 2011, and 432,000 in its first month. By May 2026 the total had passed 70 million, placing it among the best-selling video games of all time. The game itself looks modest. It is a…
- Dying LightDying Light is a 2015 survival horror game from the Polish studio Techland, and it turns the usual zombie story into a question about what time it is. The setting is Harran, a fictional city in the Middle East, cut off from the world by a…