Steam's Most Played Games This Week: Wuthering Waves Climbs as Diablo 4 Arrives

Steam's latest weekly most-played chart has a familiar wall at the top, but the better story is happening below it. Counter-Strike 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds and Dota 2 stayed in the first three spots for the May 2 Steam weekly chart, while Wuthering Waves made the biggest week-over-week climb and several launch-window games pushed into the top 100.

On Steam's public most-played chart, the top 10 is almost unchanged if you focus only on the biggest evergreen games. Look further down, though, and the week has a clearer shape: a gacha RPG anniversary update, a major Diablo IV expansion, a revived PC strategy name and a new co-op shooter all pulled visible Steam activity.

Steam's Most Played Games This Week

This table focuses on games, so Steam software and utility entries are not counted in the game rank. Weekly peak players are Steam's player-activity figure for the weekly chart date.

The top three barely need explaining at this point. Counter-Strike 2 remains in a different tier for raw Steam reach, PUBG is still comfortably ahead of Dota 2 and Valve's MOBA kept its usual top-three footing. The more useful top-10 note is Slay the Spire 2 holding above Apex Legends again, even with its weekly peak down from last week's stored snapshot.

Grand Theft Auto V Legacy was the only game to climb inside the game-focused top 10, moving up one Steam rank with a 106,034 weekly peak. Geometry Dash and Marvel Rivals each slipped one spot, while War Thunder and Rainbow Six Siege held steady at the edge of the table.

Wuthering Waves leads the weekly climb

Wuthering Waves is the sharpest pure riser in this week's top 100, jumping 36 places to No. 48 on Steam's overall chart with a 31,460 weekly peak. The move also shows up in Gamers Now's stored snapshot comparison, where its weekly peak rose by 20,486 players from the previous collected chart.

That climb has a clear live-service hook. Kuro Games released Version 3.3, Reverbs From the End of Galaxies, as part of the game's second anniversary celebrations. The official update announcement says Version 3.3 adds three main quests, two Resonators, new weapons, Dimmr Plains as a new area, cosmetics and collaboration rewards. Gamers Now also covered how Wuthering Waves was already climbing on Steam as the update arrived.

The important part is not that Wuthering Waves suddenly looks like a top-five Steam game. It does not. The point is that a cross-platform action RPG with a gacha structure can still punch into Steam's top 50 when an anniversary update gives lapsed PC players a reason to log back in.

New entries make the lower chart busier

Far Far West entered at No. 41 with a 43,832 weekly peak, making it the highest new entry in this completed weekly chart. That lines up with a strong opening window for Evil Raptor's western co-op shooter, which Gamers Now covered separately when Far Far West broke into Steam's top 50. The studio also said in a Steam news post that the game passed 250,000 copies in its first 48 hours, a separate launch milestone from Steam's player-activity chart.

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era followed right behind at No. 42 with a 53,587 weekly peak. That is a strong Steam debut for a turn-based strategy revival, especially one entering early access rather than launching as a finished 1.0 release. Hooded Horse, Unfrozen and Ubisoft said in the launch announcement that Olden Era is available on Steam, the Microsoft Store, PC Game Pass and Game Preview, with six factions, multiplayer, hotseat, a campaign act and a beta map editor in the early access build. It was also one of Gamers Now's new games worth watching this week, which now looks like the right call for PC strategy players.

Diablo IV also returned to the top 100 at No. 58 with a 59,061 weekly peak after Lord of Hatred launched. Blizzard's Lord of Hatred breakdown framed the expansion and 3.0.0 update as a major reset for the ARPG, with Skovos, Mephisto, the Paladin, the Warlock, War Plans, the Horadric Cube, a loot filter and skill tree changes. Gamers Now's earlier Diablo IV Lord of Hatred launch details explain why that package was bigger than a routine season start.

Elsewhere, Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond climbed 33 places to No. 98. That is lower on the chart, but still notable for a competitive card game trying to establish its new PC audience.

Vampire Crawlers cools after launch week

No major named game fell out of the game-focused top 10 compared with last week's stored snapshot. The same ten games stayed there, with Grand Theft Auto V Legacy and Geometry Dash simply trading order.

The sharper drop came lower down. Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors fell 38 places to No. 79 after last week's top-50 arrival, while PRAGMATA dropped 28 places to No. 71 and Mahjong Soul slid 27 places to No. 84. Vampire Crawlers still posted a 20,081 weekly peak, so the story is not a collapse. It looks more like the second-week cooling you often see after a curiosity-driven launch, especially for a spin-off that had just put up a strong first-week audience milestone.

HELLDIVERS 2 is worth noting in the other direction. It rose seven places to No. 17 with a 55,746 weekly peak, keeping Arrowhead's co-op shooter close to the top 15 even after its launch-era volatility has long passed. ARC Raiders also climbed to No. 14 and added 16,989 weekly peak players versus the previous stored snapshot, helped by a week where Gamers Now covered its PS5 Pro PSSR upgrade while its wider extraction-shooter audience stayed active on Steam.

This is still a steady week at the very top. Counter-Strike 2, PUBG and Dota 2 are not being threatened. The movement that matters is further down, where Wuthering Waves turned an anniversary update into a top-50 climb, Far Far West and Olden Era made strong first appearances, Diablo IV brought expansion players back and Vampire Crawlers showed the normal pressure that hits a new Steam launch after its first burst.