No less than the Steam Deck itself tops Elden Ring and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 in this holiday week’s Steam sales charts.

Valve’s gaming handheld may finally be hitting its stride as the company seems to have finally gotten a grip on production and distribution of its hardware. At the tail end of last year, we had reported that Valve pledged to get their first batch of orders from East Asian markets, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, which were first entered on December 1, 2022, before the end of that year. This was the latest indication that the company had finally gotten over their initial backlog of orders, and was now properly setting up to sell their hardware all around the world. This will also come in useful when Valve makes a new generation of hardware, which may come sooner than later based on how Valve themselves have been talking.

Elden Ring was The Game Awards’ Game of the Year for 2022. An immediate critical hit when it released on February 25, 2022, From Software’s latest release seemed pegged for success as the studio acquired Game of Thrones writer George RR Martin’s services to build a world that would bring them to greater mainstream success. While Elden Ring was already a popular game, it crossed the edge to being the most popular game sold on Steam because it received its very first sale for this holiday.

Of course, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is the latest in the Call of Duty franchise. While a game like Elden Ring could come up once in a blue moon, Call of Duty is a reliable annualized game franchise, produced in such a way that it caters to its own booming game community. Much like other online games, Modern Warfare 2 came with a lot of bugs and issues, but none of these are bad enough to really harm the game’s popularity.

SteamDB’s listing of top Steam sales for holiday week rounds up the top 10 with a variety of old and new games, alongside the Deck itself.

1. Steam Decks
2. Elden Ring
3. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
4. Ready or Not
5. Cyberpunk 2077
6. High on Life
7. Red Dead Redemption 2
8. God of War
9. EA Sports FIFA 2023

10. Grounded

As we know, Cyberpunk 2077 recently underwent a recent revival of sorts. Red Dead Redemption 2 more likely benefited from a Steam Deck update last October that made it playable on Valve’s hardware.

Interestingly, EA’s last game with the FIFA license didn’t drive FUD from fans to buy the last in the venerable franchise. But perhaps, this is because EA themselves gave assurances they would make more football games in the future.

Source: Pledge Times