In under 6 weeks, co-op hit Lethal Company passes Baldur's Gate 3 and Resident Evil 4 to become the highest-rated Steam release of 2023

Lethal Company trailer — (Image credit: Zeekerss)

Co-op horror hit Lethal Company is now officially the highest-rated Steam release of the year, blowing past greats like the Resident Evil 4 remake and the now post-Early Access Baldur's Gate 3 in under six weeks.

SteamDB and Steam 250 both put Lethal Company at the top of 2023's Steam lineup, with some small discrepancies owing to the way data is weighted. SteamDB gives it a 97.28% positive score while Steam 250's assessment clocks in at 99% positive. Meanwhile, the game's actual Steam page says 98% of its staggering 79,140 reviews are positive. Oh wait, I just updated the page in the time it took me to write this article and it's now 79,369.

Valve's official top sellers data shows Lethal Company, a $9.99 Early Access sleeper hit, is currently the second best-selling product on Steam, behind only the Steam Deck itself. It's beating Call of Duty, Counter-Strike 2, and Cyberpunk 2077 in sheer sales, at least for the moment. The margins are tight, but there's no doubt Lethal Company is a certified hit, and punching far above its weight at that.

Just under a week ago, Lethal Company was sitting at around 30,000 overwhelmingly positive Steam reviews and putting up player counts that rivaled the likes of Call of Duty, PUBG, and Apex Legends. At the time of writing, Steam Charts reports that its all-time concurrent player peak is 184,015, with some 42,055 playing even at its absolute weakest time period. The game is also having a moment on Twitch, with 38,300 viewers on the category at the time of writing, and that's with several big streamers and known Lethal Company fans offline.

Lethal Company's, well, company at the top of 2023's Steam releases also includes a range of other unexpected breakouts. Beloved platformer Pizza Tower has been one of the highest-rated Steam games of the year ever since its January release. It's joined by summer success story Dave the Diver, possibly the best fan game ever made in HoloCure, and VPet-Simulator, a Tamagotchi-like that puts a little anime girl on your desktop. 2023 has truly been a year of variety.

If you're new to Lethal Company, we've got some tips to help you make the most of it. Here's how to get more players in Lethal Company with a simple mod, a quick guide to Lethal Company enemies and how to handle them, and how to make money in Lethal Company.

Earlier this year, Valve offered a look under Steam's hood to explain how "games we would've never predicted" pop off so hard.

Austin has been a game journalist for 12 years, having freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree. He's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize his position is a cover for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a lot of news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.