A record-breaking year for Steam: nearly 19,000 games released in 2024, but most went unnoticed

[midian182]

In a nutshell: Do you ever feel that there may be too many games released these days? It could be because 2024 saw more new titles launched on Steam than any year before, a total of almost 19,000, up 32.5% compared to last year.

The ever-helpful SteamDB stat tracker reveals that as we enter the final few hours of 2024, a massive 18,965 games (at the time of writing) have been released on Steam during these last 12 months.

The figure is quite remarkable when you look at Steam's previous yearly totals. 2024 saw the highest number of new games ever released on Valve's platform, with 4,655 more games appearing this year compared to 2023 (14,310), marking the largest-ever yearly increase.

Just four years ago, in 2020, there were 9,686 new games released on Steam, around half the number of new releases in 2024. Go all the way back to 2006, three years after Steam first arrived, and just 70 games were launched on the service.

Courtesy of SteamDB

While there were more games than ever before released this year, only 3,973, or just over 20%, were popular enough for Valve to enable community profile features, including trading cards, badges, emoticons, etc. It's these games that count toward a user's Game Collector and Achievement Collector totals, too.

Last year, 3,874 new games were enrolled in Steam community profile features, while the figure was 3,491 in 2021, indicating a steady yearly increase. Nevertheless, the fact that 14,992 new releases in 2024 weren't popular enough to receive these features illustrates how many games go unnoticed.

Also read: Best PC Games (You Should Be Playing)

SteamDB also includes a list of the top-rated games of 2024, based on user ratings. Unsurprisingly, the crack-like addictiveness of Balatro helped it secure second place with a score of 96.75%, beaten only by MiSide's rating of 96.78%.

Other top-rated games include Black Myth: Wukong (95.91%) in seventh, Tactical Breach Wizards (95.12%) in sixteenth, and Silent Hill (93.72%) in the 66th spot. All these titles appear in our Best PC Games (You Should Be Playing) feature.

Earlier this month, Valve released its Best of the Year lists, highlighting the top-selling and most-played games of 2024.

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A record-breaking year for Steam: nearly 19,000 games released in 2024, but most went unnoticed

 

[winjer]

Just too much shovelware.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Just too much shovelware.

With AI’s help they can shovel faster now.

 

[winjer]

With AI’s help they can shovel faster now.

I would not be surprised if a decent amount of these games on Steam, are already just shovelware made by AI. But it will get much worse.

 

[zulu53]

For all those wondering what humans would do with the time saved by using AI Bots to do all of the productive work. Humans can "entertain themselves" with non-productive computer games as well as watching equally non-productive human games. At least the computer game costs considerably less than season tickets for football, baseball, basketball etc. thus being way less a burden on the productive workers who will be paying for the non-productive workers to entertain themselves with games.

 

[HardwareHunt365]

2024 was an epic year in PC gaming. Thanks to PC Game Pass as well for bringing even more Day One games.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I'd be curious to know if there were any hidden gems in that pile of unplayed games.

Doubtful, because it does feel like the cream rises to the top with Steam releases, but I also wonder how much of it is algorithmic or if there are some real unique games and gameplay elements sitting around in the abyssal zone.

Guessing a lot of these games don't even get recommended in discovery queues and such either.

 

[masaaya4]

The state of PC gaming is miserable.

It is becoming easier and easier and easier to make games, partly because of Unity and Unreal game engines, but now also because of AI.

So many horrible games are being shoved out onto steam, that it is impossible to find great games.

The games that do have potential to be great, run out of funding due to poor sales and publishers shutting the project down, and have a rushed "1.0" release in the vague hope that leaving steam early access will save their game, which it almost never does.

The situation is only going to get worse in the coming years. The only games that make good money, are the ones that ride on the word-of-mouth hype train.

I also find it much more difficult to simply sit down and play a game.

Wait for next patch, wait for next content drop, wait for next DLC release, wait until the DLC is on sale, if I wait long enough the game will be great and worthy of my time.

And then the game gets abandoned.

 

[kiwigraeme]

I'd be curious to know if there were any hidden gems in that pile of unplayed games.

Doubtful, because it does feel like the cream rises to the top with Steam releases, but I also wonder how much of it is algorithmic or if there are some real unique games and gameplay elements sitting around in the abyssal zone.

Guessing a lot of these games don't even get recommended in discovery queues and such either.

probably quite a few of them, always been the case. Books, songs (albums ), movies etc

But yes the S tier should generally get to top , but many A tier go begging

Some songs died on the vine, only to do spectacularly well when heard later in a movie, or released by someone else. You go back listen to original and it can be just as good if not better

Same in consumer world lots of great products die , and so so ones flourish.
Having a great idea, product , idea is only a part of getting it to market. Even those yucky shark tank shows have let hundreds of million dollar or even a billion dollar product escape ( the one amazon bought - doorbell or whatever it's called )

promotion, consistency, belief etc no idea it true R.E.M always given as an example of doing endless venues , building audience, craft/tightness etc

 

[TooQik]

I wonder how many of these releases were early access?

 

[RudyBob]

I will bet some of it is worth playing

 

[toooooot]

Imagine the amount of human work hours were spent for no one to even turn those games on.
Quite sad. And I am sure some of them were at least decent.

 

[AlexIL]

The state of PC gaming is miserable.

It is so miserable that in fact during this winter sale I bought exactly one fifteen years old game and forfeited plans to update aging system.

 

[arrowflash]

I'd be curious to know if there were any hidden gems in that pile of unplayed games.

Oh, there are plenty of hidden gems, and games that might not exactly be a "gem" but are fun and interesting. I had the pleasure of discovering quite a few over the years. However, finding these good games among the literal hundreds of shovelware that's pushed daily into Steam, are like finding a needle in a haystack. Or more accurately, a needle in a s*pile haha.

Doubtful, because it does feel like the cream rises to the top with Steam releases, but I also wonder how much of it is algorithmic or if there are some real unique games and gameplay elements sitting around in the abyssal zone.

Guessing a lot of these games don't even get recommended in discovery queues and such either.

I'm sure there's plenty of algorithm shenanigans involved with the titles that are pushed to the top.

Even if there isn't, there's also the fact that Steam ratings are completely useless and ultimately just noise. Lots of terrible shovelware meme games with "Very Positive" or "Overwhelmingly Positive" rates. All it takes is for some Youtuber/streamer watched by lots of children do an ironic video of some shovelware full of fake exaggerated reactions. I've also enjoyed a few games with Mixed or Negative ratings.

The state of PC gaming is miserable.

It is becoming easier and easier and easier to make games, partly because of Unity and Unreal game engines, but now also because of AI.

So many horrible games are being shoved out onto steam, that it is impossible to find great games.

The ratio of decent/shovelware games on PC has been miserable way before the AI fad started. Most of the blame definitely goes to Unreal, Unity and their asset stores (also RPGMaker, the amount of RPGMaker shovelware pushed daily on Steam is astounding).

However, I'd say a significant portion of the blame also goes to Steam itself. Unlike other stores like GOG, Steam has no standards at all about the quality of titles that are allowed on the store. There's plenty of shovelware on Steam that's a) barely functional on a technical level, b) could barely be called a video game and it's more like a tech demo made by a high schooler for their programming class, c) uses stolen assets, or d) crosses the line from inspiration/ripoff to total plagiarism of more famous titles. Some check all of these marks. Even with lots of negative reviews, and complaints to Steam staff (sometimes even by devs of other games that have been ripped off), these titles remain in the store and Gaben doesn't give af as long as suckers* keep purchasing the title and he gets his cut.

So as much as Unity, Unreal Engine and RPGMaker, Steam itself has heavily contributed to lower the bar of entry to publish anything. In past eras, many of these shovelware titles would be freeware / free-to-play games on sites like Newgrounds, however now everyone thinks they should ask money for games (there are plenty of freeware games on Steam though, and some are surprisingly decent - there's even a few "hidden gems" among them).

*suckers or criminals - I've heard plenty of rumours over the years that some of the lowest effort shovelware on Steam, especially those with ludicrous unrealistic pricing, are actually published by criminal cartels for money laundering. These are merely anedoctal rumours and theories without any proof though. Personally I believe it's probably true.

 

[kiwigraeme]

Oh, there are plenty of hidden gems, and games that might not exactly be a "gem" but are fun and interesting. I had the pleasure of discovering quite a few over the years. However, finding these good games among the literal hundreds of shovelware that's pushed daily into Steam, are like finding a needle in a haystack. Or more accurately, a needle in a s*pile haha.



I'm sure there's plenty of algorithm shenanigans involved with the titles that are pushed to the top.

Even if there isn't, there's also the fact that Steam ratings are completely useless and ultimately just noise. Lots of terrible shovelware meme games with "Very Positive" or "Overwhelmingly Positive" rates. All it takes is for some Youtuber/streamer watched by lots of children do an ironic video of some shovelware full of fake exaggerated reactions. I've also enjoyed a few games with Mixed or Negative ratings.



The ratio of decent/shovelware games on PC has been miserable way before the AI fad started. Most of the blame definitely goes to Unreal, Unity and their asset stores (also RPGMaker, the amount of RPGMaker shovelware pushed daily on Steam is astounding).

However, I'd say a significant portion of the blame also goes to Steam itself. Unlike other stores like GOG, Steam has no standards at all about the quality of titles that are allowed on the store. There's plenty of shovelware on Steam that's a) barely functional on a technical level, b) could barely be called a video game and it's more like a tech demo made by a high schooler for their programming class, c) uses stolen assets, or d) crosses the line from inspiration/ripoff to total plagiarism of more famous titles. Some check all of these marks. Even with lots of negative reviews, and complaints to Steam staff (sometimes even by devs of other games that have been ripped off), these titles remain in the store and Gaben doesn't give af as long as suckers* keep purchasing the title and he gets his cut.

So as much as Unity, Unreal Engine and RPGMaker, Steam itself has heavily contributed to lower the bar of entry to publish anything. In past eras, many of these shovelware titles would be freeware / free-to-play games on sites like Newgrounds, however now everyone thinks they should ask money for games (there are plenty of freeware games on Steam though, and some are surprisingly decent - there's even a few "hidden gems" among them).

*suckers or criminals - I've heard plenty of rumours over the years that some of the lowest effort shovelware on Steam, especially those with ludicrous unrealistic pricing, are actually published by criminal cartels for money laundering. These are merely anedoctal rumours and theories without any proof though. Personally I believe it's probably true.

Good post, thing is there probably are many more people you are quite creative and fast learners . Look at plethora of 2D platformers, castlevania style games, yeah their first ones won't be a cuphead - But the will probably look great and play a little janky.

Many games developed eg minecraft from something very basic, geometry dash . popcap PvZ

I still thing lots of opportunities for indies aka Dredge etc

 

[McMurdeR]

My only real criticism of the Steam store is that it's flooded with junk that definitely gets in the user's way.

One has to wonder how many of these titles have zero or single digit sales. I'm not sure how it works today, but there are any number of measures Valve could take to handle spam developers, including a small one off listing fee per title, segregation, curation, etc

 

[user478318]

Who cares for new games? All the top played PC games are 10+ years old. Another gaming industry crash is coming like in the eighties, they spend insane amount of money on new AAA games that nobody gives a damn about anymore!! Human creativity is not unlimited, all these new games are rehashes of the games we played as kids. Originality is dead.

 

[ddferrari]

2024 was an epic year in PC gaming. Thanks to PC Game Pass as well for bringing even more Day One games.

So what was your favorite game, and how many hours do you have into it?