EA's surprise announcement of a number of classic games on Steam last month were some of the hottest releases of the year for those of us living in the year 2005. I don't know about you guys, but I immediately snatched up The Saboteur, Populous, and the old Command & Conquer, and having them in my main library on Steam, detached from the EA app, was too tempting to turn down.

Apparently, many people share that sentiment: according to GI.biz, the European game charts for March were completely dominated by a bunch of RTSs from over 20 years ago: 11 of the 20 best-selling games in Europe were good old "Command & Conquer" games, and that too digital and physical sales were spanned.

In fact, five of the top 10 games in March were command-and-conquer games, with C&C: Generals being the most popular, taking fourth place behind EA Sports FC 24, Helldivers 2 and Dragon's Dogma 2

. FYI: Renegade is the most recent title released 22 years ago.

One confusing thing is that you can't buy the games in the C&C Ultimate bundle individually, either on Steam or in the EA app. It's all or nothing. Given this, it's not entirely clear why "Generals" is a few steps ahead of its partners, but it's probably due to record-keeping quirks. These statistics are, after all, from GSD, which gets its numbers directly from publishers like EA.

Be that as it may, it's unfortunate for games like WWE 2K24 and Princess Peach Showtime, which were dropped from the top 10 and 20 respectively last month due to EA's massive 20-year-old RTS on Steam. Clearly, 2K should retaliate by releasing The Darkness 1 on PC. Let this develop into a competition between mega-corporations to release older games. Eventually, one of them will have to release "Mercenaries".

So what are the reasons for C&C's rapid growth? Well, they are all absolute classics, so that has something to do with it, but the Ultimate Collection has been available on the Origin/EA app for a while now.

Of course, the main reason is that Steam is the de facto PC store front and they'd rather have their games on Steam than spread out across various platforms, but I think the awfulness of the EA app also has something to do with it... C&C released on Steam Ultimate Collection doesn't have to go through EA's ridiculous launcher. For that reason, it was a must-buy for me.