So what? The vast majority of games released on Steam are either hobby or student projects or just first time devs’ shitty pixel platformer. Many are low effort products, Steam will not even give those games “shelve space”. The algorithm will based on pre launch and launch metrics decide if it should push the game in front of customers in the recommendation sections of the store. If a game can’t even move the needle a bit after launch Steam will blackhole the game and basically make it invisible in the store unless a customer searches for it. Because even though it’s a virtual store, “shelve space” aka the recommendation section is still scarce.
The hidden gem games on Steam are rare. Every time I watch a dev’s postmortem on Youtube who talks about how little they sold I’m rarely surprised when I see the game.
Also Steam generates around $10+ Billion in revenue in a year. So the other games generate around $2 Billion. If that is generated by 2000 games that still averages to a million a game.
~21.500 titles released in 2025, we’ve seen more than 16.000 games released this year so it will once again break a new record for titles released in a year.
That data also shows which games never got out of the “limited game status”. Around 16200 of games released in 2025 have the limited games status. Meaning these games were not making enough money or nothing at all and had not enough player engagement to unlock profile features.
If you look at the numbers of games that unlocked profile features the growth is much lower. Those are the numbers that matter anyway. 5000 games made actual money. And if we apply the Pareto principle than a thousand games made the vast majority of the new release revenue that year.
So if you release a game on steam not only you are promoting a centralized closed platform owned by a billionare but there’s a good chance you are not getting much in return.
Good chance if your game didn’t do well on Steam that you didn’t make a good game that has high product-market fit in the first place and didn’t promote it properly. We are now in an era where indie devs have become millionaires from their $15 games. And I’m not just talking about Edmund McMillen and Johnathan Blow. Go back to the days of brick and mortar retail and that was nigh impossible when a small studio would earn pennies on the dollar for every sold unit.
So what? The vast majority of games released on Steam are either hobby or student projects or just first time devs’ shitty pixel platformer. Many are low effort products, Steam will not even give those games “shelve space”. The algorithm will based on pre launch and launch metrics decide if it should push the game in front of customers in the recommendation sections of the store. If a game can’t even move the needle a bit after launch Steam will blackhole the game and basically make it invisible in the store unless a customer searches for it. Because even though it’s a virtual store, “shelve space” aka the recommendation section is still scarce.
The hidden gem games on Steam are rare. Every time I watch a dev’s postmortem on Youtube who talks about how little they sold I’m rarely surprised when I see the game.
Also Steam generates around $10+ Billion in revenue in a year. So the other games generate around $2 Billion. If that is generated by 2000 games that still averages to a million a game.
1 in 11 games released last year has 0 reviews.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
~21.500 titles released in 2025, we’ve seen more than 16.000 games released this year so it will once again break a new record for titles released in a year.
That data also shows which games never got out of the “limited game status”. Around 16200 of games released in 2025 have the limited games status. Meaning these games were not making enough money or nothing at all and had not enough player engagement to unlock profile features.
If you look at the numbers of games that unlocked profile features the growth is much lower. Those are the numbers that matter anyway. 5000 games made actual money. And if we apply the Pareto principle than a thousand games made the vast majority of the new release revenue that year.
Also don’t forget all the shovelware low effort games for farming “achievements” achievements
So if you release a game on steam not only you are promoting a centralized closed platform owned by a billionare but there’s a good chance you are not getting much in return.
Good chance if your game didn’t do well on Steam that you didn’t make a good game that has high product-market fit in the first place and didn’t promote it properly. We are now in an era where indie devs have become millionaires from their $15 games. And I’m not just talking about Edmund McMillen and Johnathan Blow. Go back to the days of brick and mortar retail and that was nigh impossible when a small studio would earn pennies on the dollar for every sold unit.