40% of new games on Steam didn’t earn $100

In 2025, almost 13 thousand games were released on Steam, but for most of them everything ended quietly and unsuccessfully – sales were minimal, and the developers were unable to return even the basic fee for publication.

Polish developer Artur Smerowski, the author of the turn-based RPG Soulash and its sequel Soulash 2, published an analysis by Gamalytic, which shows a disturbing picture of the indie market. According to the data, about 40% of all new releases in 2025 (12,732 games) earned less than $100, about two-thirds – less than $1,000, and only 8% managed to overcome the $100 thousand mark.

At the same time, Steam still uses regional prices at the 2022 exchange rate, which makes many titles more expensive for buyers from some countries.

Steam Game Statistics

According to Gamalytic, 30% of less profitable projects brought in an average of $37, and 47.4% of games sold less than 100 copies. Another 28% – from 100 to 1000 copies. Thus, most developers could not even recoup the $100 that Steam charges for publishing a new game. This amount is returned only if the project earns at least $1000 in gross revenue, which not everyone achieves.

Gamalytic clarifies that it does not have access to Valve’s internal statistics, so the figures may have an error of up to 50%, but the general trend is obvious – the indie game market is oversaturated, and visibility and sales are rapidly falling.

It should be borne in mind that some of these projects are free games without monetization, including fan and experimental works. However, the data demonstrates the scale of the “game going nowhere”: most creators release their projects for the sake of the release itself, not for profit. Even though more and more games are created with the help of AI, reducing costs, the time, resources and effort spent often do not pay off at all.