[A] ton of games were released on Steam this year. Valve’s store has seen nearly 13,000 game launches since January 1, 2025, according to Steam data hound Gamalytic, and a majority of those games went straight under the couch to be forgotten for the rest of time like lost batteries.
This sounds like too many games are being made. I suppose a lot of these are hobby/passion projects or learning exercises people have made, but that has to be more games than there is any viable market for.
Just knowing how the internet be, I bet it’s 98% shovelware garbage looking for whales
Just knowing Steam, it’s shovelware.
There’s a lot of complete trash. Multiple reskins of the same puzzle game with randomly generated names. Bare bones minesweeper clone written entirely by AI, and advertised as such. That sort of thing.
Its also that it takes time building an audience, and some devs are awful at setting up their store page.
How many of them were good games and original?
Listen best I can do is ai slop.
Precisely three.
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Yeah. The same thing has happened in the music world, the book world, and even the movie world.
YouTube lowered the barrier to entry to basically nothing if you want to publish your own movie. Getting millions of people to watch it, even completely for free, is very difficult. Almost all of the videos out there with millions of views were published by people who were already well known (even if they grew their fanbase directly on YouTube).
Music is probably fairly similar to movies in that you can publish easy on YouTube and then direct everyone to your Bandcamp site to buy music from you.
The book world is probably hardest to crack. There are so many authors out there and it’s very easy (from a technical standpoint) to publish your own book. Writing a book a lot of people want to read and getting people to read it is a totally different matter!
I think the book part is solved through ebook portals. There’s a LOT of books on the Kindle store with shitty stories, grammar mistakes and AI cover pics (if not completely wwritten by AI nowadays)
What the all have in common is they’re digital products. There is a fixed overhead cost to host on a platform, but almost no cost per sale/visit/download, so you don’t need to worry about scaling production and distribution.
The deeper thing they have in common is that they’re all products which follow power law distributions based on popularity. Popular items get more exposure by word of mouth than unpopular or unknown items. That exposure leads to even more popularity which results in exponential takeoff.
Thus you can have a music industry where Taylor Swift can make a billion dollars on one tour while millions of other musicians languish in total obscurity.
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Maybe. Quickly looking at games that don’t really sell:
https://steamdb.info/sales/?max_reviews=10&min_discount=0&min_rating=0&min_reviews=0
Mostly it just looks like games nobody asked for. Definitely some A.I. and asset flips included, but some look like effort was put into them … however they don’t look fun to me. Like, at all.
idk, “Dildo Catcher” sounds like it may be fun
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ow did they limit it? I still see all the regions in steamdb. I know the exchange rates haven’t been updated in a while so their suggested regional prices haven’t been pretty bad
To release something for free on steam, does it cost $100?
Is that 100 per game or per developer account?
yes
you a pay deposit to publish on steam, you get it back after enough sales
Is there a search filter for hardly bought games?
You could filter for very low reviews <10 on SteamDB
https://steamdb.info/sales/?max_reviews=10&min_discount=0&min_rating=0&min_reviews=0
I’m not sure if steamdb can search the entire catalog, but at https://steamdb.info/sales/ you can put a filter on the maximum number of reviews.
Not exactly the same thing, but may be a decent proxy.
With the economy tanking like it is, they likely won’t recover soon either
