Over 19,000 games were released on Steam in 2025, half of which players didn’t even notice

In 2025, more than 19,000 games were released on the Steam platform – a new record for the service and more than the previous year, when 18,559 releases were recorded. At the same time, almost half of new projects received less than 10 reviews, and 2,229 games were left without any reaction from users at all.

This gap between the number of releases and the real attention of players is explained by the open publishing model: the platform allows games to be released even by small or little-known teams. The problem is that most of them do not have the resources for marketing, so their projects are lost among thousands of others. Some of the games are really low quality, but there are also technically interesting releases that simply did not get a chance to be noticed.

Valve is trying to reduce this problem with the help of algorithmic recommendations, wish lists, tags and curators, but so far these tools are not able to significantly change the situation with the oversaturation of the catalog.