71
Over 5,000 games released on Steam this year didn't make enough money to recover the $100 fee to put a game on Valve's store, research estimates (www.gamesradar.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/steam@programming.dev
10 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Don't bother sitting down because you'll just stand up when you hear this: 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.

Gamalytic regularly updates its data but these particular milestones and thresholds were recently flagged on social media by Artur Smiarowski, creator of turn-based roguelike RPG Soulash and its markedly more popular sequel Soulash 2. As of today, Steam has seen an estimated 12,732 games released in 2025.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I am not a programmer, but I guarantee I could gobble together enough free or paid assets to technically qualify as a game and have it "released on Steam". That's not a high bar.

And yet, I don't think we're headed for another crash similar to the 80's one, or that digital marketplaces are necessarily even oversaturated with games, since there's multiple ways of curating, sorting, and showcasing the best and most popular ones.

But I do think the onus is on consumers to use these tools and shop smart (and patiently, if they want the best deals), especially in this economy...

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    And yet I don’t think we’re headed for another crash similar to the 80’s one, or that digital marketplaces are necessarily even oversaturated with games, since there’s multiple ways of curating, sorting, and suffering the best and most popular ones.

    The '80s crash was the result of physical hardware sitting unsold on shelves, such that retailers no longer wanted to keep them in stock anymore.

    By contrast, the '20 deluge of slop isn't taking up inventory space. It's taking up marketing bandwidth. You're not going to dig a big pit and shovel in all the Ataris nobody wants to buy. But you might hit a point of saturation such that nobody can hear about the next BG3, because every media channel is inundated with ads for Mobile Command Wizard Fortress Nuclear Fantasy Final Ninja War Strikers.

    I'm already seeing this in the mobile space. Finding a mobile game that isn't dog shit is virtually impossible.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Yeah, the gaming crash is imo, already underway.

    Sooo many huge, recent, AAA or even "AAAA" basically catastrophic failures, so many games that are just gacha mtx'ing the fuck out of people...

    And people don't have the money anymore.

    The gaming industry is going to crash, but that won't actually really hurt gaming in general, imo, it will refocus onto smaller and medium sized teams, who focus on gameplay, style, actually competent stories and writing, anybody or team who can make something good without even needing a publisher.

    Sure, there will still be big mega corpo games with recognized IPs and graphics thst you can only appreciate with a $2000+ GPU and such, but I think its gonna look a lot more like the 90s / early 00s pc gaming market, basically, wild fucking west.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    And people don’t have the money anymore.

    The joke of it is that these games don't even bother targeting "retail" players anymore. They're all hunting for the Whale Player - the individuals who will spend upwards of five or six figures on a game's loot boxes and other gimmicks.

    The gaming industry is going to crash

    I don't know what a "crash" looks like at this point. When your very model is "Free 2 Play" and your primary revenue stream is this tiny minority of players, what are we expecting the change? A bunch of these players aren't even in the US. They're gamers in ultra-wealthy Emirates states or failkids from Korea and Japan, with credit cards that have no real upper limit. And if they fail... so what? These are clones of clones. Reskinned copies of games that never had much of a production budget to begin with.

    Or they're subscription based games that generate revenue off people who have simply forgotten to cancel their accounts. The Gym Membership enterprise model, where you're just collecting $15/mo from thousands upon thousands of people who got suckered in during the hype cycle and forgot they were getting billed.

    Sure, there will still be big mega corpo games with recognized IPs and graphics thst you can only appreciate with a $2000+ GPU and such

    This is where I think we might genuinely see a ceiling. If the supply of semiconductors ever hits a serious crunch, you're going to see the price of high end cards and consoles go well beyond the reach of retail gamers. And then we really will all be stuck on Stardew Valley, because that's the high line of computer graphics we can support.

    But the idea that people will stop turning out new titles (or clones of clones of archaic titles) seems dubious. We're never going to have a cartridge graveyard. And we're never going to run out of three-person teams of novel developers pushing the next generation of Cult of the Lamb or Slay the Spire or Deep Rock Galactic.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent