The videogame business is in a harmful house for the time being because it goes by a hellish self correction leading to quite a few studios shutting down and other people dropping their jobs. In some ways, it seems to have grown too massive, too shortly, and one of many methods we are able to see that’s by the sheer quantity of video games competing for folks’s consideration.
One of many best locations to see that is Steam. As the largest PC storefront round, it has a staggering quantity of video games being launched each day, and based on Steam tracking site SteamDB, 2024 saw the biggest increase since 2017.
In accordance with the information, slightly below 20,000 video games had been placed on Steam final yr, versus the 14,310 that had been launched in 2023. That’s an increase of 32.52%.
Now, in equity this isn’t the largest enhance Steam has ever seen. For instance, in 2014 the platform noticed an enormous upswing in video games being launched onto the platform, leaping up from the pretty constant 400 or so per yr to 1,714. That’s a 293.1% enhance. Why, you ask? Easy: Valve grew to become lessy choosy about what may very well be launched on their storefront, and the remaining is historical past.
Since 2014, the shop has seen an increasing number of video games, as you possibly can see from this chart beneath.
| Yr | Video games | % Improve |
| 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% |
Primarily based on the numbers, this yr has seen a median of 51.95 video games launch PER DAY on Steam.
Unsurprisingly, many of those video games are getting misplaced within the shuffle, unable to standout amongst the tons of of releases hitting the storefront each week.
As for Steam, it’s nonetheless doing nice. VGInsights claims that the platform introduced in $11bn in income in 2024, up from 2023’s £8.8bn and 2022’s $7.6bn.
The variety of folks utilizing the platform retains rising, too. On December fifteenth, 39,319,632 folks had been logged onto Steam on the identical time, breaking the earlier report of 33.59 million achieved in 2023. It appears a secure wager that Steam will blast by 40+ million concurrent customers in 2025.
So in different phrases, whereas there are extra video games than ever being put onto Steam, there are additionally extra gamers than ever, too. However, to my feeble thoughts, it nonetheless raises the vital query of simply how sustainable this all is. 2024 noticed some fairly massive names struggling to succeed in their gross sales targets. Steam’s personal knowledge confirmed that its customers solely spent 15% of their time taking part in titles launched in 2024. 47% performed titles starting from 1-7 years outdated. Likewise on console, the highest performed video games are regularly dominated by older video games like Mincraft and free-to-play titles similar to Fortnite.
Talking of the struggle for consideration, let’s speak about restricted video games. SteamDB divides all of its tracked video games into two classes: video games and “restricted video games.” Restricted video games are those who haven’t achieved the required participant engagement or gross sales numbers to do away with the “Profiled Characteristic Restricted” tag that Steam offers them. This tag stops them from showing on folks’s achievements listing, for instance, or getting used to craft medals. The thought being that it helps cease abuse of the buying and selling card system, achievements and extra.
It’s price remembering that video games that fall beneath the “Restricted” class should not at all times shovelware or junk. It simply is perhaps a small launch that by no means discovered an enormous viewers, a ardour venture somebody launched without spending a dime or one thing else fully.
Of the 18.9k video games launched onto Steam in 2024, 14.9k of them fell into the “Restricted Video games” class. If we take “Restricted Video games” out of the equation for a second and focus solely on titles that received enabled profile options, the numbers aren’t fairly as scary: 3, 984. In comparison with the three,878 of final yr, that’s a really small enhance. The yr earlier than (2022) that it was 3,495.
Taking a look at that knowledge, we are able to postulate that whereas the full variety of video games being launched is rising exponentially, the quantity of them which might be truly discovering an viewers is rising at a far slower fee. In different phrases, there are plenty of video games hitting Steam that get buried beneath the software program landslide.
The likes of PlayStation, Xbox and Swap are going through related issues. On the PlayStation retailer, for instance, there are 190 releases listed because the fifth of December. Whereas that’s not as loopy as Steam, it’s nonetheless plenty of video games for folks to sift by. No surprise an indie recreation being launched onto such a busy market finds it arduous to get observed.
What do you make of this knowledge?
