The videogame industry is in a dangerous space at the moment as it goes through a hellish self correction resulting in numerous studios shutting down and people losing their jobs. In many ways, it appears to have grown too big, too quickly, and one of the ways we can see that is through the sheer amount of games competing for people’s attention.
One of the easiest places to see this is Steam. As the biggest PC storefront around, it has a staggering amount of games being released on a daily basis, and according to Steam tracking site SteamDB, 2024 saw the biggest increase since 2017.
According to the data, just under 20,000 games were put on Steam last year, versus the 14,310 that were released in 2023. That’s a rise of 32.52%.
Now, in fairness this isn’t the biggest increase Steam has ever seen. For example, in 2014 the platform saw a huge upswing in games being released onto the platform, jumping up from the fairly consistent 400 or so per year to 1,714. That’s a 293.1% increase. Why, you ask? Simple: Valve became lessy picky about what could be released on their storefront, and the rest is history.
Since 2014, the store has seen more and more games, as you can see from this chart below.
| Year | Games | % Increase |
| 2014 | 1,714 | 293.1% |
| 2015 | 2,825 | 64.82% |
| 2016 | 4,662 | 65.03% |
| 2017 | 6,937 | 48.8% |
| 2018 | 8,883 | 28.05% |
| 2019 | 8,097 | -8.84% |
| 2020 | 9,686 | 19.62% |
| 2021 | 11,307 | 16.73% |
| 2022 | 12,381 | 9.49% |
| 2023 | 14,310 | 15.58% |
| 2024 | 18,965 | 39.52% |
Based on the numbers, this year has seen an average of 51.95 games release PER DAY on Steam.
Unsurprisingly, many of these games are getting lost in the shuffle, unable to standout amongst the hundreds of releases hitting the storefront every week.
As for Steam, it’s still doing great. VGInsights claims that the platform brought in $11bn in revenue in 2024, up from 2023’s £8.8bn and 2022’s $7.6bn.
The number of people using the platform keeps rising, too. On December 15th, 39,319,632 people were logged onto Steam at the same time, breaking the previous record of 33.59 million achieved in 2023. It seems a safe bet that Steam will blast through 40+ million concurrent users in 2025.
So in other words, while there are more games than ever being put onto Steam, there are also more players than ever, too. But, to my feeble mind, it still raises the important question of just how sustainable this all is. 2024 saw some pretty big names struggling to reach their sales goals. Steam’s own data showed that its users only spent 15% of their time playing titles released in 2024. 47% played titles ranging from 1-7 years old. Likewise on console, the top played games are frequently dominated by older games like Mincraft and free-to-play titles such as Fortnite.
Speaking of the fight for attention, let’s talk about limited games. SteamDB divides all of its tracked games into two categories: games and “limited games.” Limited games are those that have not achieved the required player engagement or sales numbers to get rid of the “Profiled Feature Limited” tag that Steam gives them. This tag stops them from appearing on people’s achievements list, for example, or being used to craft medals. The idea being that it helps stop abuse of the trading card system, achievements and more.
It’s worth remembering that games that fall under the “Limited” category are not always shovelware or junk. It just might be a small release that never found a big audience, a passion project someone released for free or something else entirely.
Of the 18.9k games released onto Steam in 2024, 14.9k of them fell into the “Limited Games” category. If we take “Limited Games” out of the equation for a moment and focus solely on titles that got enabled profile features, the numbers aren’t quite as scary: 3, 984. Compared to the 3,878 of last year, that’s a very small increase. The year before (2022) that it was 3,495.
Looking at that data, we can postulate that while the total number of games being released is increasing exponentially, the amount of them that are actually finding an audience is growing at a far slower rate. In other words, there are a lot of games hitting Steam that get buried under the software landslide.
The likes of PlayStation, Xbox and Switch are facing similar problems. On the PlayStation store, for example, there are 190 releases listed since the 5th of December. While that’s not as crazy as Steam, it’s still a lot of games for people to sift through. No wonder an indie game being released onto such a busy market finds it hard to get noticed.
What do you make of this data?