Steam's glut is making discovery the hard part
Making a game has become easier, and Steam, the main PC games store, now releases so many a year that the hard part is being noticed. A streamer playing a game is one way through, and Steam's own store is another.
Latest figure · 2026 so far
19,934 games
Games released on Steam in 2026 through 16 September, already within a few hundred of 2025's whole year.
Where it stands
Steam released about 20,700 games in 2025, against about 7,000 in 2018, and almost half of 2025's releases drew fewer than ten user reviews. Developers say social media is their main way to find players, and they rate streamers above paid advertising. Because Steam releases far more games each year than it used to, even good games launch to much smaller crowds. That has made free demos important. How many people play a demo is now the best early sign of how the full game will launch.
Steam released about 7,000 games in 2018 and 20,676 in 2025, and 2026 had nearly matched that by mid-September. The number of games that get noticed has barely moved.
*Games released on Steam in 2026 through 16 September, already within a few hundred of 2025's whole year.
SourceGamalytic, Steam games by year (read 16 September 2026)
| Year | Games released on Steam, by year |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 7,062 |
| 2019 | 6,960 |
| 2020 | 8,493 |
| 2021 | 10,115 |
| 2022 | 11,033 |
| 2023 | 12,913 |
| 2024 | 17,416 |
| 2025 | 20,676 |
| 2026* | 19,934 |
Timeline
2017
Steam Direct replaces Greenlight
Steam replaces Greenlight, where players voted on which games got in, with Steam Direct, which asks only for paperwork and a $100 fee per game. Steam had been releasing a few thousand games a year, and the gate that kept the number there is gone.
MCV/Develop, Steam Direct launches, replacing Greenlight submission programme (14 June 2017)
2021
Valve puts numbers on Next Fest
Valve, which runs Steam, reports on Steam Next Fest, an event of free demos that started in 2020 when E3 did not take place. Across the first five fests, the typical game gained about 15 times as many daily wishlist adds (players saving a game to buy later) as usual. Wishlists added during the fest also turned into sales at five times the rate of those added in the two weeks before.
2023
The ten biggest new releases take 61% of new games' revenue
Video Game Insights, which sells Steam estimates, finds that the ten biggest games released on Steam in 2023 took 61% of the revenue of all games released that year, up from 43% in 2020. Baldur's Gate 3 alone took 21%. It counts sales of the games, not spending inside them.
Sensor Tower VGI, Global PC Games Market Report 2024 (January 2024)
2024
A record year, and most of it unnoticed
SteamDB counts 18,945 releases with a few days left in the year, about 5,600 more than 2023 and the biggest jump it has recorded. Yet only 3,964 of them reached the popularity level Valve requires for community features, barely more than the 3,874 in 2023.
2025
Half of 2025's releases draw under ten reviews
SteamDB counts more than 19,000 releases so far. Almost half get fewer than ten user reviews: about 2,200 get none, and another 7,100 get nine or fewer. Only about 1,200 pass 500 reviews.
2026
Four trackers, four counts, one record
Chris Zukowski compares four trackers' totals for 2025: SteamDB 20,008, VG Insights 20,282, Gamalytic 20,353, and GameDiscoverCo 20,558. They differ mainly in how they count games Valve removed. Growth of about 11% is the third-smallest yearly increase since Steam Direct began.
How To Market A Game, Chris Zukowski, How many games were released in 2025? (8 January 2026)
Streamers rank above paid advertising
GDC's annual survey of more than 2,300 game industry workers asks how developers find new players. Social media leads at 65%, followed by streamers at 39%, paid advertising at 31%, events at 30%, community platforms at 28%, and traditional press and bloggers at 25%.
GameDev Reports, on GDC State of the Game Industry 2026 (16 February 2026)
A 500-player launch is now a 100-player launch
GameDiscoverCo's five-year outlook: a game that would have launched to 500 people playing at once on Steam eight years ago now launches to 100 or fewer. The games are not worse. There are just many more good ones competing for attention.
GameDiscoverCo, Simon Carless, 14 trends for the next 5 years of PC/console games (1 May 2026)
A record Next Fest, and each demo gets less
June's Steam Next Fest includes a record 4,382 demos, 66% more than a year earlier's 2,645. With more competition, each game gets less attention. The top tenth of games gained about 121 followers each, down from 163 in June 2025, and the top 1% fell from 1,759 to 1,330.
GameDiscoverCo, Simon Carless, Who 'won' June 2026's Steam Next Fest? (23 June 2026)
The demo forecasts the launch
GameDiscoverCo studies 2,569 Steam games launched between January 2024 and August 2026 whose demos had more than 50 players at once. At launch, the typical game peaked at about three times its demo's peak. The best quarter averaged about six times, the worst just over one. Of 2026's 100 top-earning games, 58 had a demo first.
Valve moves Steam's discounts off a calendar and onto an algorithm
Valve announces in late September 2026 that Steam's Discounts and Events section will stop using curated, calendar-based placements in early 2027 and become personalized for each customer. Valve says the change lets more discounted games appear on the homepage instead of competing for a small fixed number of slots, and that testing showed ten times as many games reaching customers in a day in that section. Universal Daily Deals end with it.
Consequences
012022
A YouTuber who tells players what to buy starts publishing games
Jason Gastrow, the YouTuber known as videogamedunkey, launched a publisher called Bigmode, saying that players who care about games come to his channel 'to find out what's actually worth playing.' Bigmode offers the games it picks funding, publicity, testing and translation.
022025
Forty-one hours watched, one copy sold
Comparing viewing and sales across 2025 releases, GameDiscoverCo found that games sold about one copy for every 41 hours people spent watching them streamed after launch. Wishlists also jumped when big streamers played a game's open beta, as happened with Mecha Break. GameDiscoverCo notes this shows the two move together, not that streams cause sales.
032025
The typical 2025 release made $249
Most games earn almost nothing. Gamalytic puts the typical 2025 Steam game's earnings at $249, up from $222 in 2024. Two-thirds earned under $1,000, and 40% did not earn back Steam's $100 fee. The year's releases earned $4.7 billion in total, down from $7.6 billion, even though more games came out than ever.
042026
A game has to break out of its bubble
There is no longer a mainstream audience to launch a game into. Each player sees their own mix of recommendations and creators, so a game has to stand out enough to jump from one group to another. A spot on Northernlion's YouTube playlist, or a mention on a novelist's podcast, is the kind of jump that now decides a game's fate.
Objections
Counterpoint2026
The trackers disagree by hundreds
Release counts depend on who is counting. Four trackers put 2025 anywhere from 20,008 to 20,558 games, and Gamalytic's own site, the source of the chart above, now says 20,676. For 2024, SteamDB counted 18,945 in late December and Gamalytic 17,416. Every count shows the same upward trend, but the exact numbers differ.
How To Market A Game, Chris Zukowski, How many games were released in 2025? (8 January 2026)
Counterpoint2026
Steam says more games are breaking through, not fewer
Valve's own numbers say more games than ever are finding buyers. In 2025, 5,863 games earned more than $100,000 on Steam, nearly double 2020. About 1,700 of those, 8.5% of the year's releases, came out that year, up from 7% in 2024. Sales from Steam's Daily Deals grew 274%, and 69% of the 1,500 games featured there had never been featured before. Steam's own store is still a way players find games, and it is growing.
Counterpoint2026
Manor Lords doubled its sales with no stream behind it
Some hits need streamers and some do not. Manor Lords doubled its Steam sales from 1.7 million to 3.3 million copies while it had little viewing on Twitch. Sales of Path of Exile 2 rise with its updates, not with how much it is watched. GameDiscoverCo's view is that streamers drive some successes and clearly not others.
GameDiscoverCo, Simon Carless, What Twitch data adds to our view of game discovery (16 June 2026)
What to watch
2026
Whether 2026 sets a new record
January 2027, when the trackers publish their counts for the year. As of 16 September, Gamalytic had counted 19,934 releases in 2026, against 20,676 for all of 2025. Unless the rest of the year is unusually quiet, 2026 will set a new record.
2027
Whether streamers gain on social media in the next GDC survey
GDC's next annual survey, due early in 2027. It will show whether streamers have closed the gap with social media as a way to find players, and whether paid advertising has fallen further behind.
Further reading
- DataGDC: The State of the Game Industry 2026gamedevreports.substack.com
- DataDoes your Steam demo CCU 'predict' your game's success?newsletter.gamediscover.co
- AnalysisHow many games were released in 2025?howtomarketagame.com
Where to follow it GameDiscoverCo (Simon Carless), Naavik, GDC State of the Game Industry (annual), Gamalytic, SteamDB
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