The videogame trade is in a harmful house in the mean time because it goes by means of a hellish self correction leading to quite a few studios shutting down and folks dropping their jobs. In some ways, it seems to have grown too huge, too shortly, and one of many methods we will see that’s by means of 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 every day, and in keeping with Steam monitoring website SteamDB, 2024 noticed the largest enhance since 2017.
In line with the information, slightly below 20,000 video games have been placed on Steam final 12 months, versus the 14,310 that have 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 12 months 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 increasingly more video games, as you possibly can see from this chart under.
| 12 months | 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 12 months 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 have been logged onto Steam on the similar time, breaking the earlier report of 33.59 million achieved in 2023. It appears a protected guess that Steam will blast by means of 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 necessary query of simply how sustainable this all is. 2024 noticed some fairly huge names struggling to succeed in their gross sales targets. Steam’s personal information confirmed that its customers solely spent 15% of their time enjoying titles launched in 2024. 47% performed titles starting from 1-7 years outdated. Likewise on console, the highest performed video games are continuously dominated by older video games like Mincraft and free-to-play titles equivalent to Fortnite.
Talking of the combat for consideration, let’s discuss 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 eliminate the “Profiled Characteristic Restricted” tag that Steam provides them. This tag stops them from showing on folks’s achievements listing, for instance, or getting used to craft medals. The concept being that it helps cease abuse of the buying and selling card system, achievements and extra.
It’s value remembering that video games that fall below the “Restricted” class should not all the time shovelware or junk. It simply may be a small launch that by no means discovered an enormous viewers, a ardour venture somebody launched at no cost or one thing else solely.
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 obtained enabled profile options, the numbers aren’t fairly as scary: 3, 984. In comparison with the three,878 of final 12 months, that’s a really small enhance. The 12 months earlier than (2022) that it was 3,495.
that information, we will postulate that whereas the entire variety of video games being launched is growing exponentially, the quantity of them which can be truly discovering an viewers is rising at a far slower fee. In different phrases, there are numerous video games hitting Steam that get buried below the software program landslide.
The likes of PlayStation, Xbox and Swap are going through comparable 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 numerous video games for folks to sift by means of. No surprise an indie sport being launched onto such a busy market finds it arduous to get seen.
What do you make of this information?
