How many of them were good games and original?

[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.

To release something for free on steam, does it cost $100?

Is there a search filter for hardly bought games?

With the economy tanking like it is, they likely won't recover soon either

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...

Uh, yep, a lot of people who think they are game devs are actually morons, and/or just trying to be able to say 'I have a game that is listed on Steam'.

Yep.

The market situation is really difficult, unless you are really really lucky. We've continued with a college project and eventually managed to release a hand-drawn coop top-down shooter, around 2 hours of story-based gameplay, that was locally pretty successful as far as marketing goes - we were in local national television, have several "best indie game" awards from conferences, even including Czech Game of the Year in student category. We had czech streamers playing the game, had reviews and even were featured in a Microsoft article about student gamedev, and we were featured in the New and Noteworthy on Steam for quite a bit.

We've eventually managed to get around 6000 wishlists, and the reception was generally positive.

After almost half a year after realease, we have only dozens of sales.

We don't have any investors we own money to, and never really made it for profit, but it is still difficult to see 6 years of your work that you though was going pretty well end up like this. I'm not really surprised, because it is local-multiplayer only story based game (although Steam Remote works), which will limit the target audience size by quite a bit, but I definitely won't be ever making a game where I expect that it will sell, and rather focus on smaller experiements, gamejams, and making games for making games sake.

Tying money into your gamedev is a recipe for disappointment.

That's not even a lot of money, and it at least creates a small barrier of entry. And there's still a lot of crap in Steam.

I see a lot if indies talking about their game development on other platforms, so hopefully by the time they list they already have an audience and can handle the fee.

But if a game is just low effort shovelware they deserve to lose it.

Doesn't mean they were bad.

Just means the market is oversaturated :/

I would love to try making a game. Even games that I love to play still have a few minor things here and there that I wish were different. If I made the game myself, I could just change it myself and make it as close to perfect as I'm humanly able. Engines like Godot and similar make it so easy to do these days.

But the competition is extremely fierce. There are so many games on Steam that the chances of "making it" and being the next Hades or similar are just not that good. I'm clearly not the only one with a dream like this. That and the fact that making a game is a ton of work. Graphics, audio, gameplay, balancing, marketing, social media🤮, etc.

If I'm in the position someday where I don't need to turn a profit from it, then I may do it anyway, but I really feel bad for all the people who are trying to pursue their dream and yet may never make it there. We're in a golden age for the players, but for the creators, it's very difficult, to say the least.