Every year, I look at how many games have launched and how many have reached “Real Steam” (which I arbitrarily pick as having 1000+ reviews.) This year I want to track it throughout the year. Are we on track to have a blockbuster year of hit games? Is AI going to flood steam with thousands and thousands of generated art?
In today’s blog I am looking at the games released in the first quarter of the year (Jan 1 – March 30th)
About this data:
- I used VGInsights to filter and sort the data
- For the 1000+ earning games I removed games that were China-only and not translated to English.
- I have both paid and free games in my data-set.
- I removed AAA games and games based around big name IP like Ninja Turtles and Tekken because their success could be driven by that.
Number of games released
As of today, 4147 games have been released on Steam since 1/1/2024.
To put that in perspective, here is a graph of the number of games released every quarter for the last 5 years.
That little blue dot is 2024’s releases.
4147 games released so far is a 26.7% increase over last year.
If the trend continues, I expect about 17,500 games to be released on Steam in 2024.
Player increase
Based on the increase, are there enough new players also coming in? I used the SteamDB player charts to see
- 33,598,520 Players in March 2023
- 36,354,393 Players in March 2024
A 8.2% increase in players.
Side note: Calculating the number of new games vs the number of new players isn’t very interesting because there is a lot going on in 36 Million players and motivations behind what types of games and how much they spend will drive you mad trying to find a connection.
I don’t think it is worthwhile to scare yourself while doing some back of the napkin number of players / games.
Number of games that hit 1000-reviews
I like to look at the games that have earned at least 1000 reviews because they are usually games that have found an audience in the Steam marketplace.
There is nothing magic in the algorithm about 1000, it is just a nice round number. And it is really really hard to get 1000 reviews, even if you are a free game.
Basically to get to 1000 reviews the Steam algorithm needs to love a game and promote it. Nobody can get to 1000 reviews by just tweeting a ton.
So in the first quarter there are 72 games that have already earned at least 1000 reviews.
Remember the filters here:
- Games that are Chinese only are out.
- Games with external IP are filtered out.
- AAA games are out.
- Early Access released games are in.
- Free games are in.
Here are some of the big ones:
Interesting and surprising hits
- EGG
- LASERS
- KeeperRL (a cool looking game that was built using amazingly popular Oryx’s asset packs)
- Rental
- No Case Should Remain Unsolved
What is the proportion of games per review rating
In this chart I look at how many reviews games earned that released since January 2024
As you can see 82.9% of games released this year have earned fewer than 50 reviews. Most of these games are hobbyist projects that don’t “follow the meta”
Let me explain…
The Steam Marketing Meta
The core of the Store Marketing meta is to get at least 7000 wishlists (~700 followers) before releasing. This is the bare minimum of a following to have a chance to move up the charts and be on the path to earn 1000 reviews.
For example, when looking through sub-10 reviews games I found a couple games that look really neat but sold poorly. Bitty Knight looks cool launched with 3 followers after 2 weeks on the store. Classic “just throw it up and hope for the best” instead of following the Steam best practices.
So I wanted to see how many actually followed the “meta” by filtering for games that earned at least 700 followers.
Note I can’t filter based on followers at launch, just followers at this moment. Popular games often get a bunch of followers simply by launching and being promoted by the algorithm. I can’t go back in the data and see how many followers they had at launch.
So how many games have 700+ followers at each review tier?
Let me explain this a bit. This means that only 0.39% of the games that earned fewer than 10 reviews have 700+ followers.
Of the games that earned 101-399 reviews, 71% achieved at least 700 followers.
The 1000+ games are pretty much all 700+ follower games. The only exception is a silly free maze game: 20 Small Mazes. People probably just play it once, leave a review and forget about it as soon as they are done playing. Also this Chinese-only F2P game with 1000+ reviews and only 455 followers. Not sure what is going on there.
The AI flood gates
In a blog posted at the beginning of 2024, Valve announced that they would allow AI-generated content on Steam. Many assume this will open a flood gate of content that will make the ~14000 games released last year look small. They fear that every day thousands upon thousands of generated games will clog the store and “Real games” won’t be visible.
I tried my best to look through a bunch of the sub 10 review games to see if I saw a bunch of AI generated games. Nothing really stood out as some slapped-together-Midjourney-generated project.
A lot of people point out that the capsule for hit game Supermarket Simulator (19,546 reviews) looks AI generated
It might be but the rest of the game looks human-made and reviewers love it.
When I was looking for games with lots of reviews but low follower counts, I found this game that has a few characters that have weird ai-like-hands and weird buckles that don’t seem to line up. Not to mention that this woman clearly doesn’t know how to hold a gun, wear a Bandolier, or put on a hat. But then again, it could just be anime. (Should we really be trusting her with firearms?)
So in conclusion, yes there are more games on Steam in 2024, but the increase is in proportion to the rate of increase between 2022 and 2023. If AI games really were flooding the market I would expect to see 1000% more games this year instead of a more modest 26%.
It doesn’t seem like there is now a sudden AI tsunami. I think it is just more and more people making games.
Genre trends
Because there are only 71 games that have reached 1000+ reviews, I can carefully go in and evaluate the type of game instead of relying on Tags which can be unreliable for understanding the actual genre.
The following charts the genres I assigned to each 1000+ reviewed game.
Couple surprising things:
Survival games
Survival games are white hot right now. These are Open-world-survival games where you must go out into the wilderness to collect resources, farm, build weapons, and then usually defeat some big enemy. Here are the top ones:
Where are the Vampire-Survivor-likes?
It seems like the VS-likes genre might finally be settling down. There was only 1 VS-style game (Action Roguelike) so far that hit 1000+ reviews: Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor
Puzzle games are they a thing?
Yes and no. Yes they are the second most popular genre among the winners but they are mostly free hidden object games (most of them by the developer 100 Hidden Animals.)
A lot of people think this developer is doing something underhanded like buying bots to play the game and increasing the CCU. I think that is just an internet ghost story. I know it sounds strange and is hard to believe but people really like cat games on Steam. Also, remember that these games are free.
Also one of them is a free collection of mazes: 20 Small Mazes
So most of this “puzzle revival” is due to one developer putting out a lot of free cat hidden object games that have found an audience.
Quarter #1 Summary
So yes there are more games being released this year but it is within the range of what was expected. It is more important than ever to make sure you pick a game that is in a good genre (Open-world survival likes, Horror, City Builder) and market it hard (get at least 7000 wishlists).
If you are having a hard time getting to 7000 wishlists, it could be a sign that people aren’t very interested in the title and your chances at pulling out a hit are very slim.
I am still very optimistic about Steam. If you look at the list of games they are quite diverse. We have Narrative games (No Case Should Remain Unsolved) and Deckbuilders / Poker (Balatro) and Simulators (Supermarket Simulator) and experimental odd things (Nothing) and shooters (Intravenous 2: Mercenarism)
It doesn’t seem like a race to the bottom like Mobile. It doesn’t seem like there is 1 big developer that dominates the list. There isn’t one type of game that people churn out. It is still an interesting space where games made by small teams can succeed.
When I check in again at the end of Quarter #2 (July) we will have had a Steam Summer Sale which will move a bunch of games that were close to the 1000 reviews over the line. The sale typically ends mid-July so look for that analysis then.