Indie hit Lethal Company narrowly beats Baldur’s Gate 3 as Steam’s highest-rated game of 2023

After coming out of nowhere and taking the internet by storm, Lethal Company can brag how it’s 2023’s highest-rated Steam game, according to user reviews, managing to outperform even Baldur’s Gate 3.

Although Steam listings don’t feature scores based on user reviews, Steam 250 functions as a score aggregator similar to Metacritic. According to Steam 250, when strictly looking at games launched in 2023, Lethal Company has the highest average user score of 8.76. Baldur’s Gate 3 just barely takes second place with a score of 8.7. Third and fourth place, meanwhile, go to the Resident Evil 4 remake and indie platformer Pizza Tower, despite both scoring at 8.69.

It’s surprising to see Baldur’s Gate 3 as a runner-up considering how popular it’s been, even taking Game of the Year at 2023’s The Game Awards. But Lethal Company—a co-op survival horror game—sneaked out of seemingly nowhere and rapidly exploded in popularity. What helps Lethal Company is that it has a smaller total of user reviews—238,000+ compared to Baldur’s Gate 3’s 521,000+. Thus, the latter has more negative reviews to hamper its score.

It can be argued this isn’t a fair comparison. In fact, SteamDB offers its own take on 2023’s highest rated Steam games using a different algorithm, which it believes is more accurate. However, SteamDB’s list doesn’t just swap Lethal Company and Baldur’s Gate 3 around. Instead, the former is knocked down to second place, with first place going to HoloCure – Save the Fans!, a free fan game that’s essentially Vampire Survivors but with V-Tubers. As for Baldur’s Gate 3, it drops even further to ninth place while Pizza Tower and Resident Evil 4 swap places, taking third and fourth place, respectively.

While this sort of thing can be endlessly debated, what can’t be argued is financial success. On that front, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Lethal Company are undeniably making a lot of money on Steam. At the time of writing, both games are the top two sellers on the platform. The only thing selling more than either of them is the Steam Deck console.