The year 2024 is almost over. At the end of what has been a terrible year for the gaming industry and its media, but a good year for the number of high-quality games released, we can finally look back at the raw data on our favorite hobbies.
Well, at least when it comes to Steam. Which, considering Valve’s PC platform dominance, is a pretty right picture of the industry.
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Steam data aggregator SteamDB, the site that everyone (including us) used to track how well each fresh release was doing and whether this or that long-awaited sequel managed to match or beat its predecessor in terms of player counts, has released its end-of-year results .
The statistics page gives a fairly concise, high-level look at the state of Steam game releases in 2024. According to SteamDB, 18,949 fresh games have been released on Steam this year, well ahead of last year’s total of 14,310. In fact, with one exception, the number of fresh games each year has increased significantly above the previous year.
However, the jump between 2023 and 2024 may be the largest ever in a single year, indicating that clutter and detection problems will persist into 2025 and beyond. These numbers, of course, include everything released this year, including free games, experiments, joke games, student projects, and games that you and I may have never heard of.
The report also found that of the nearly 19,000 fresh games, only 3,973 were popular enough to be included in Steam’s profile feature, allowing them to offer collectible trading cards, emoticons and other customization items. Only achievements in these games can also count towards the user’s total.
In total, only 3,973 managed to get noticed by players for Valve to allow them access to these expanded features, which represents just over 20% of all games released in 2024 on the platform. The good news is that this number is also growing year on year, which means that the audience capacity for fresh titles Is is growing, albeit slightly.
