Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader Tops Steam December Sales
December 2023 was one of the hottest months for gamers with more launches, upgrades, and discounts heading to Steam game hub. It is also the month that usually registers the most sales in the year, and it did not change. However, the big winner in sales was Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader which topped the list of Steam sales.
GameDiscoverCo estimates that Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader was the top-grossing new release last month, making Owlcat Games another success. In the latest GameDiscoverCo newsletter, Simon Carless reported that Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader reached $12.6 million in gross revenue (before Valve’s 30% cut, refunds, and taxes) in its first month.
Another interesting tidbit is that Owlcat’s RPG outperformed the popular new title House Flipper 2, which has an estimated $9 million in revenue by GameDiscoverCo. Albeit Rogue Trader has a higher total revenue due to its availability on the Epic Games Store, GOG, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
As of December 7, Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader had 45,405 concurrent players on Steam, just 1,320 short of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous’s all-time high. The game ranked 7th among nearly 1,500 CRPG titles in peak concurrent users.
Although Owlcat Games has not disclosed sales figures, it has been a commercial success. It debuted at #5 on Steam’s weekly top-sellers chart and was the second-highest-grossing premium title for December 5-12.
However, Rogue Trader dropped to #19 the next week, and it’s still unclear whether it sold more copies than Owlcat’s previous RPG, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, which sold over 250k copies in its first week (its lifetime sales topped 1 million in January 2023).
The game currently has a “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam, with 74% of its 7.9k reviews being positive. This is a far cry from its 88% score at launch, but the studio continues to work on fixes. Owlcat has hit two massive successes behind each other, giving the studio a large workload for 2024.
