2024 is almost over. In the final throes of what has been a terrible year for the games industry and the media that covers it, but a good one in terms of the number of quality games that were released, we can finally look back at some raw data about our favourite hobby.
Well, at least as far as Steam is concerned. Which, considering how dominant Valve’s platform is on PC, it’s a pretty accurate picture of the industry.
Steam data aggregator SteamDB, a site that everyone (ourselves included) has used to track how well every new release has been doing, and whether this or that highly-anticipated sequel managed to match or beat its predecessor in player numbers, has released its end-of-year results.
The stats page gives a fairly brief, general look at the state of game releases on Steam in 2024. According to SteamDB, 18,949 new games were released on Steam this year, beating last year’s 14,310 by quite a margin. In fact, with one exception, the number of new games each year has climbed well above the year prior.
The jump between 2023 and 2024, however, may be the largest yet for a single year, indicating that the clutter and discoverability problems will remain in 2025 and beyond. These figures, of course, include everything released that year, including free games, experiments, joke games, student projects and games you and I may never hear of.
The report also reveals that of the nearly 19,000 new games, only 3,973 were popular enough to be rolled into Steam profile features, allowing them to offer collectible Trading Cards, emojis and other customisation items. Only those games’ achievements could count towards a user’s total, too.
In essence, only 3,973 managed to get noticed by players for Valve to allow them to access these extended features, which is a little over 20% of all games released in 2024 on the platform. The good news is that it’s a figure that has been rising every year, too, so the audience’s capacity for new titles is growing, if only slightly.