Just think: in 2006, there were only 70 new games launched on the platform.
There's Steam and there's everyone else. It's a phrase that's repeated year after year, but more than ever, it seems to reflect the state of the video game world, especially on the PC. Few believed in the system set up by Valve on September 12, 2003, but it really took off with the release of Half-Life 2 a year later, on November 16, 2004. At the time, most observers imagined that Valve would fail miserably, and quickly put behind it its desire for independence from the major publishers of the day, including Sierra, with Half-Life 1.
The rest we all know, and Steam is not only a success story, it is above all a crushing domination of the PC video game market, completely wiping out physical media and eclipsing all competitors who tried to stand in its way. The most recent of these, the Epic Games Store, despite its weekly games giveaways, has not managed to gather enough studios and players to be a "player that counts". To exist on the PC, you need to be present on Steam, unless you're a publishing giant... and even then, Electronic Arts, Microsoft or Ubisoft port their games to Steam.
SteamDB
The success of Valve's platform shows no signs of slowing down, despite the fact that for the past few years, most gamers themselves have found that there are too many games being released on the platform. For the studios, it's not much better, and it's extremely difficult to get noticed in the face of competition that never stops... and it's not the figures for 2024 that have just been released that will reassure the most pessimistic. According to SteamDB, the leading authority on the subject, no fewer than 18,945 games have been released on the platform since the beginning of the year. A figure to be compared with the 14,310 games released in 2023, which had already happily smashed the 2022 record (12,381 games).
In reality, with the exception of 2019 (8,097 games), the number of titles released each year on Steam has only increased. The question today is whether this progression will be able to continue, given the profusion of games that are becoming hard to spot. It's also interesting to note that, although the number of players on Steam is also increasing year on year, they have only allocated 15% of their playing time to new releases in 2024: 75% of their leisure time has been spent on older titles.
