Position #4 on Steam’s Top Sellers: Sol Cesto, a hand-drawn roguelite from a three-person French team that launched three days ago. $9.37. Ninety-two percent positive reviews from over 1,000 players.

Position #6: EA SPORTS FC 26, the latest annual installment of a multibillion-dollar sports franchise built by studios across two continents. $22.50 — only because EA cut the price by 75%, dropping it from $89.99. Forty-six percent positive reviews. More than 9,000 of its 16,800 reviewers are telling people to stay away.

Two games, two chart positions apart, two completely different stories about how Steam’s marketplace actually works in 2026.

The Numbers Don’t Lie (But They Do Tell Different Stories)

Sol Cesto earned its spot. Developed by Tambouille, Géraud Zucchini, and Chariospirale, published by Goblinz Publishing, the game sits at #4 across Top Sellers, Specials, and has earned a Steam Featured Win — a Valve program that gives community-voted titles premium storefront placement. It’s the kind of visibility that indie developers dream about, and Sol Cesto has made the most of it.

The game currently hosts 2,597 concurrent players and climbing, with a review spread of 1,004 positive to just 93 negative. At $13.99 full price (currently 33% off), it’s an easy impulse buy. But impulse doesn’t explain 92% positive — that’s quality converting into word of mouth.

EA SPORTS FC 26, by contrast, has 56,842 concurrent players and a chart position that only exists because Electronic Arts hit the emergency discount button. When your game needs a 75% markdown to crack the top six, you’re not winning — you’re liquidating.

What the Players Actually Say

Scroll through Sol Cesto’s review section and you get a portrait of delighted chaos. One player with 5.9 hours logged wrote: “I wanted to sell the bomb to the shopkeep. It set off. No more items for me :(” Another, at 4.1 hours: “A very addicting game that has a very cool artstyle, which kind of reminds me of old-school ttrpgs. 10/10 game, good job devs!!!”

Now scroll through FC 26’s reviews. The top negative review, from a player with 291 hours invested, reads: “The game is impossible to play, UT is unplayable if you dont grind 24/7 […] The game is scripted beyond anything we have seen before. If you pay up, you get matched with people who dont pay and dont have the best teams […]” The next top negative, from someone with 233 hours: “so ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ game.”

That’s the review profile of a game people can’t stop playing and can’t stop hating — the annual sports game trap. EA promised FC 26 would be built on community feedback, and it launched to a 77 Metacritic average, the best since the FIFA split. According to Soccer Gaming, the goodwill evaporated within months. Content creator AA9Skillz called it the worst FIFA/FC title ever made in a post that drew 1.6 million views on X. Former competitive player BorasLegend described it as “another store-pack-fest disaster class.”

Twitch viewership for the FC franchise has been bleeding out year over year — from 51,000 average viewers in January 2024 for FC 24, down to 38,000 for FC 25 in January 2025, and just 26,000 for FC 26 this January, per TwitchTracker data cited by Soccer Gaming. That’s a nearly 50% decline in two years during what should be a peak content window.

Can the Little Guy Hold?

Polygon called Sol Cesto “the most hypnotizing game” of 2026 so far and praised its ingenious design: a roguelite where every dungeon floor is a four-by-four grid, and every move is a visible gamble with clear percentages. You click a row, your character lands on one of four boxes at random — monster, trap, chest, or healing item. The strategy comes from manipulating those odds through teeth (passive buffs) and character-specific abilities that bend the rules. It’s risk-reward stripped to its bones and then layered back up with genuine build depth.

The art, hand-drawn by comic artist Chariospirale, has drawn comparisons to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art and old-school European animation — a look that’s immediately distinctive in a storefront full of pixel art and Unreal Engine sameness.

The question is sustainability. Sol Cesto’s 2,597 concurrent players is strong for a three-day-old indie, but it’s a fraction of FC 26’s 56,842. The Featured Win placement is temporary. The 33% discount won’t last forever. And breaking into the top five on Steam during your launch week is one thing; staying there is another.

But right now, in this specific moment on the Steam storefront, the math is unambiguous. A nine-dollar game about managing your luck is outselling a multi-million-dollar football franchise that had to cut its own price by three-quarters just to keep up. Sometimes the algorithm gets it right.

Sources