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More than 6,000 games have been released on Steam in 2017

More than 6,000 games have been released on Steam in 2017

In excess of 6,000 games have hit the Steam storefront this year to date.

That’s according to data from Niko Partners’ Daniel Ahmad (below), who says that this means that close to more titles have been released on the platform than between 2005 and 2015. That’s insane.

Per Ahmad’s handy graph below, the number of releases coming to Steam has increased over time; the spike of new releases in 2014 was likely the result of Early Access becoming more of a force in the market. That scheme and Greenlight will have helped the acceleration in new games up to 2016, while 2017’s spike will be the result of Steam’s brand new Direct service.

Since that was rolled out, more than 200 games a week have been hitting the digital storefront. Many of these are asset flipping fake games, which Steam has been cracking down on, but the amount of competition on the platform right now is perhaps its biggest issue. Per SteamSpy data, this has also had an impact on the amount of revenue seen by developers

Well, uh, that and the massive amount of abuse its reviews system is undergoing.


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PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.