A record 14,000+ games were released on Steam in 2023

A record 14,000 games were released on Steam in 2023.

As charted by independent Steam analytics site SteamDB, 14,535 games were released on the platform last year, up roughly 2,000 from 2022’s count.

According to market insights firm Circana, the closest any other platform has come in the US is the 2,360 games released on Switch, which was also in 2023.

The number of games being released on Steam has exploded in the past few years. In just five years, Steam has gone from releasing 8,134 games in 2019 to over 6,000 more in the last year.

This shows no signs of slowing down, as in 2024 alone, the storefront has already released 80 games in just four days. If that cadence were to continue, almost 29,000 games would be released on the platform this year.

The reasons for the huge increase in the number of releases on the platform include the increased democratization of game development tools, as well as the lax curation on Valve‘s side.

The latter has led many players to bemoan the fact that the platform has become unwieldy to navigate and that quality new releases are lost in the shuffle against the waves of low-quality games making it onto the storefront.

A similar complaint has been lobbied at Nintendo‘s eShop, which released over 2000 games in 2023. While this is a fraction of Steam’s behemoth number of releases, the high number of ‘shovelware’ titles that appear on the platform weekly has caused players to call on Nintendo to do more to curate the platform.