Now that 2023 it is time for our annual tradition of looking at how many games were released on Steam and then saying OH MY GOD THERE WERE 1,212,315,756,687 games released last year. Indie games are over. This is the end. Time to get a real job. 

If you would like to read some good freakout posts that do this check out:

For a more sober and realist read, check out Simon Carless’s post about this. He also made this great graph. Just how big have PC & console game catalogs got? 

Look before you freakout

The best thing to do before you freak out about something is to first look at the problem and poke it a bit. Let’s look at where the growth in the number of games released  is coming from. 

I used VGInsights.com to slice the number of games released each year into a series of categories based on how many reviews they earned.

  • I also filtered out AAA and AA games. Just indie games here. 
  • This data includes games that are free. 
  • This data includes games that are EA released and have not transitioned to 1.0.

TL;DR findings

Since 2019 the number of “commercial” indie games is fairly consistent. The source of all this “out of control” growth is from more and more first time indies who are launching their first hobby project. These games received almost no marketing, didn’t follow the recommended Steam process of building wishlists for months, are porn games, or a straight up asset flips.

If you look only at the total number it seems scary, but diving deeper into the data you will find that the size of the “commercial” indie games hasn’t increased that much.

The categories

  • 0-9 Reviews – These games never graduate out of the visibility sandbox. I wrote about that sandbox here.
  • 10-50 Reviews – These games typically have done the work to get out of the sandbox but have something holding them back. Either it’s the game is a first attempt at making a game so simplistic graphics, no real concerted marketing effort, or didn’t follow the standard Steam marketing strategy of building up wishlists over a 6 month+ period.


———————— The Hobbyist Line ——————————–

Based on my experience consulting and analyzing Steam for years, a decently made game that is marketed with some effort can get at least 51 reviews. There are some basic best practices to follow that the Steam Algorithm has established and you can read about those rules here. I feel that games that fall below this 50 review line are usually hobbyist projects where someone is usually working on their first game without a serious financial outcome in mind, or they just didn’t do the necessary research to see the basic strategy for launching a game on Steam.

Below the Hobbyist line are “commercial games” from people trying to make a living doing this

  • 51-100 Reviews – Games that earn this typically are very successful hobbyist projects or are games that were marketed well but just didn’t meet the mark. Maybe wrong genre, wrong marketing. This can be a happy surprise or a sad outcome depending on the type of developer. Usually games here earn less than $20,000. Now depending on your situation this MIGHT NOT be a failure. My most popular post from last year is all about how we should strive to make $20,000 games while we are learning how to make games.
  • 101-399 Reviews – These games typically earn in the multiple 10s of thousands range all the way up to hundreds of thousands. I know a couple developers who had 250ish reviews and earned $35,000 ish dollars. However I know one dev who is at 390-ish reviews and earned $330,000 gross from Steam. So depending on the price of the game this can be an ok outcome. Again depending on your studio setup. 
  • 400-999 Reviews – Again depending on your studio setup this can be a VERY successful game. I know a few developers who have games in this range and they earned $200,000 gross all the way up to $700,000. Again see how the earnings overlap between tiers. It depends on the price of the game. But for small teams, with decent development schedules, this can be a sustainable project. 
  • 1000+ Reviews – This is the real money. This is life changing money. This is never-have-to-work-again style money. Games that earn this many reviews are “BLESSED” by Steam and are heavily promoted. They are the games you always see at the top of festival pages, in the “More like this” section, and have a popup at launch. I know it seems like it is reserved for the big guys but I know several small teams that achieved this. Most of my post mortems are games in this range. 

So I went through the recent history of Steam and filtered the number of games at each tier since 2015 and plotted it in a “worm” chart.

Here is how to read it. 

  • Each review tier that I list above is a different “worm” color. For example 0-9 review earners are blue, 10-50 review earners are orange, etc.
  • The thickness of the worm indicates the number of games in that tier. 
  • The relative position of each “worm” for each year indicates which is the biggest. For example you will notice in the bottom right of the chart, in 2022 and 2023 the purple and green “worms” crossed. That indicates that in 2023 there were more games that earned 400-999 reviews than games that earned 1000+ which was the first time that happened. 

Why we shouldn’t freak out about 14,000 games released in 2023

So there were 2195 more games released in 2023 than the previous year. 

But that increase is almost entirely in the 0-50 review range. So what if I go back and filter out games that earn less than 50 reviews since 2015?

Amazingly, there has not been that big of an increase in the number of “commercial” games released on Steam. Here are the counts of games filtered for 51+ review earning games. 

And if you go back to the worms chart, that bottom layer is so boring, so consistent. In fact I think the only reason purple and green twisted there at the end is because many games haven’t had enough time on the Store to earn 1000 reviews. They will eventually, just not at the time I made this graph.

What’s the deal with this orange “elbow”?

This is weird right? In 2018 the 10-50 review worm shot way up to the #1 spot and then abruptly shot back down the next year. 

This elbow shows the anti-shovelware algorithm corrections Valve implemented in 2019. They wrote a cryptic blog post about it here that reads like PR mixed with legalize. They also had this blog post to explain it. I gave a talk explaining this. You can watch it here:

Basically Steam noticed that a lot of Shovelware games were using the natural organic Steam traffic to earn enough sales to justify the shoveling. People were churning out games that were just achievement generators so players could get cool looking icons to put on their profile. There were card farming operations that were probably secret money laundering schemes. It was a mess. In 2018 enough games were able to get enough visibility that enough shovelware games were able to earn more than 10 reviews. 

Then Valve freaked out and said “GET BACK SHOVELWARE” and they added all these visibility limits until you proved to valve that your game is a serious contender. For instance you need to get a ton of wishlists before launch, and you need to earn at least 10 reviews to get any visibility at all. These changes are why you can’t have trading cards for your game until you earn about $15,000. It is all about controlling the flood.

As you can see from the sharp downward angle of the orange worm in 2019, Valve beat back the evil Shovelware worm. They essentially built a firewall that keeps games that are low-effort or “my first game” from ever breaking through. 

Seriously. You cannot find these games on Steam organically. You have to do what I do on VGInsights to filter just to get a list of them. 

Are you sure the sub 10s are all shovelware?

So you might be ready to pounce and say “well those 10 reviews games are really hard working indies who are caught in the toxic sludge of all these games”

There over 6000 of these games so I didn’t have time to do a deep investigation of all of them but by doing a regular random sampling of them, they really are shovelware games. Even if I filter to look at just games that cost above $10 they are either porn games, my first RPG maker game, or some weird thing that I don’t even know what was going on. 

Like this game Fetus in oil painting where you explore a very simplistic looking version of the British natural history museum. If you look at the screenshots, they include a lot of sculptures but not a single painting (in oil or in any other medium to be honest), and there are no fetuses. Nothing against the developer, but I wouldn’t expect this game to do well on Steam.

The games in the Sub-10 list just haven’t been marketed. The average number of followers for these sub 10 review games is 51 which is about 500 wishlists. The median number of followers is just 23 (or 230 wishlists). 

I did find a couple games that looked competent, and like someone actually cared about making something with a modern game dev sensibility. Iron Dungeon is one such game:

This game looks great. It is a 2D platformer which is hard to market, but a 2D platformer roguelike which is a bit better. I did some digging and it seems like the developer didn’t get the game into Steam Next Fest. They posted this on reddit without much further explanation.

Unfortunately, Iron Dungeon didn’t make it to Steam Next Fest, but you can still try the demo!
byu/Purmalis inGameDevelopment

As mentioned, there is a general Steam marketing plan and it involves Steam Next Fest. By missing Next fest it shows that this is a first time dev who is new to marketing on Steam.

I also see that the developer has never discounted below 10%. Other than launch they have never notified their wishlisters of their game. This is a fundamental aspect about marketing your game on steam.

It’s normal to have trouble marketing your first game. That’s why I always recommend that a developer’s first game shouldn’t be their dream game. You need to learn the basics which really come from releasing.

And you find some retro games put out by real companies like this retro collection of A Boy And His Blob

Back when I was a kid, I was so excited to play a boy and his blob on NES. But to be honest, this game was never that fun. I find that many of these companies that put out retro collections have a hard time marketing them because they get a big catalog of games and they don’t have the time and the upside is not going to be high enough to do a full marketing push for each one. 

Why so many MORE sub 10 review games?

So why was there such a big increase over the last year? 

Are these games in the Sub 50 reviews really Shovelware or are they poor sad indies who have been caught in the giant filter?

I have 3 theories why there is such an increase in Shovelware

Theory 1: Prologue trick (unsuccessful):

 I wrote about the prologue trick here but basically you put up a free version of your demo as a full game and if enough people play it, it can rank on the upcoming charts. This strategy works but many fear that it will be abused. Maybe a bunch of people are trying this trick and it is increasing the number of games? I searched through all the sub 10 review games over the years that contain the word “Prologue” and there were only 16 games that included the word “prologue” in 2023. There were 131 games with the word “prologue” in them in 2023 of all success levels. That is a lot but it does not account for the 2195 more games that we had this year.

But not all games use the word “prologue” in them. So if I just look at what % of games are free over the years you can see a slight increase in 2023 but it is very slight, just 1% more than the previous year. 

So I don’t think the store is getting jammed up with a bunch of people trying the prologue trick unsuccessfully. 

Theory 2: It is money laundering schemes (Games over $100) and scammers

The theory here is that there are crime lords from around the world creating shell games and selling them for $100+ each and then buying them with dirty money.

There are more games that cost more than $100 in 2023 vs the other years, but not thousands more

There are some weird scammers too. I don’t think they are money launderers but it is suspicious that Hopping Up For It has 49,367 followers and only 1 review.

But there are also lots of devs who try a bunch of things, and release a lot of games and seem pretty genuine.

For example, Follow The Fun Dev released 25 games in 2023. But they are actually kind of neat.

There is one paid game earned 77 reviews and seems like a pretty neat concept: I commissioned some Cats

The other 2 free games are pretty clever game design trinkets:

Theory 3: It is the dawn of the AI generated fire hose?

After Valve released this statement saying AI art is now allowed on Steam, 

Aftermath.site recently publish this provocative headline Steam’s New AI Rules Will Open The Floodgates To A River Of Shit 

It reminded me of this GDC talk about these developers who created an automated system to publish games on the Android store with a single sentence prompt. 

Looking through the swamp of sub 10 review games I did find some games that looked like some art was AI Generated and got through last year’s Steam AI ban. 

These portraits in this game’s about this game section look kind of AI-ish

I do think AI will open a floodgate, but Steam’s sewer system does a really good job keeping those games underground. Those developers trying the AI firehose would have to do some real marketing to get the wishlist count high enough to start the ladder of visibility.

I am not concerned about the pending AI firehose. I don’t think Valve even needs to change the algorithm much to control it. So “A River Of Shit” will be safely contained and won’t give us cholera.

I am confident that anyone who is creating some AI-powered machine that will turn out 10 games a day will not interfere with your launch. 

I wonder if 2023 was an intenal test for Valve. Maybe they watched to see how their system responded to all these new games and when they saw that they were able to keep all these new games under 50 reviews, they decided they could handle a deluge of AI games and said, “come and get us, AI is now legal.”

It’s just hobbyists or new developers making their first game (And that isn’t a bad thing)

If I graph the sub 10 reviewed games by price point you will see most of them are at $4.99. That is like classic my first game price. 

Those games will never find a big enough audience and they cost $5

The Steam playerbase is growing. As the world becomes wealthier everyone has more leisure time and they are spending it gaming. SteamDB noticed that Steam reached an all time high of Peak concurrent players over 33,000,000!

After getting exposed to more and more games, people around the world are saying “I could do that. I am going to try making a game” This is a good thing! 

I profile a lot of developers who have released a hit game and many of them have a “failed” game that never got into “real steam”

For example:

You have to release a failed game before you can release a hit game. Usually you have to release dozens of failed games before you release a hit. 

In 2023 we are seeing more developers trying development by releasing their first game. Many of these developers will be glad to have released anything and cross it off their bucket list and move on to other lifetime goals like skydiving or learning how to Ollie.

Most developers release one and only one game. 

This is the main reason you shouldn’t yell at all these 0-50 review developers. They are just chasing the same dream you are. Somewhere in that 6000 high-pile of low-selling games is a developer who is going to make an amazing hit game in the next couple years.

Complaining about too many games on Steam is like saying “I didn’t get into the NBA because there are too many kids playing High School Basketball.” To get into the NBA you have to be really really good. To have a hit game, you have to be a really good game developer regardless of how many games there are out there.

Final thoughts

I am not saying being an indie game developer is easy. It is a very hard business. The customers are fickle, and the product is hard to make. I have seen games that I thought were a sure-fire-hit flop. 

However, based on my analysis I don’t think the reason good games underperform is because there are “too many games on Steam.” I mean, if Steam only had 1 game on it and it was your game, then yes it would probably sell better than in today’s environment. But in reality, I don’t think the market is so hard because there are too many games. Every year there are probably only 3000 COMPETITIVE titles released that have a chance. That hasn’t changed very much.

My hunch is that games fail to do well for 3 reasons:

Reason 1: You are still learning how to make games

Games are very very very hard to make. A game is a combination of at least 4 different creative disciplines and they must cohere. Even though you might be very proficient in one of those disciplines, you might be severely lacking in another and that will hurt your chances.  

Do you think it is harder to release a game or ride a 2-wheel bicycle? Obviously releasing games is harder. But you didn’t ride a bike perfectly the first time you jumped in the saddle, so why should you be able to release a good game the first time? 

You need to release a lot of games to get good at it. 

Reason 2: You haven’t learned the basic rules of Steam visibility

The reason I started this blog was because I was mad that nobody told me the rules of Steam: Publish a coming-soon page early, create a trailer, participate in online festivals, get streamers, get wishlists, show up on popular upcoming, get 10 reviews, get on new and trending, and discount regularly. 

You basically had to know another developer who was successful and they would tell you these rules. But not everyone had access to that one experienced developer. 

I write this blog so you learn the basic steps to set yourself up for success on Steam. 

To get out of “The sewer” you have to do some marketing. You have to learn the Steam algorithms. This is how you show Valve that you are a “commercial” developer. This is the “curation” that so many people want: doing the basic marketing necessary.

Reason 3: You know how to make games but the product just missed the mark

Even if you are an experienced game developer or put together an experienced team, you still must make a game that excites the audience. This is a product problem. There are some genres that people like, some graphics that excite people, and some scenarios that make people interested and tell other people about it. And then there are games that are well made but they just aren’t interesting to people.

Some games, no matter how perfectly planned, just don’t resonate with people. It is like an unfunny joke. Some jokes aren’t funny and it’s really hard to explain why not.

In my post a few weeks ago, I wrote about how Playway has built a business strategy around the fact that they have no idea what players actually want so they just try everything to see what sticks.

The image on the left is Barn&Farm Renovator and has a relatively lack luster ~4000 wishlsits. While the image on the right is Deconstruction Simulator and it has ~16,000 wishlists. They both involve fixing buildings. But for whatever reason people are much more interested in fixing single family homes in suburbia than they are in fixing barns. I have no logical explanation for this other than game players are irrational and you cannot predict what they like.

I have seen a lot of data for median playtimes for free demos. Despite a game being pretty and in a popular genre, the alchemy of elements didn’t cohere and despite the demo being free, people didn’t want to stick around and finish it. They had better things to do.

That is what makes games so hard. 

The only advice I can give here is you have to stay nimble. Don’t over-commit to an idea. If the idea doesn’t seem to interest people and you aren’t getting traction, wrap it up and move on to the next game. 

Also study the market. Because there are 3000 COMMERCIAL GAMES released each year on Steam you can’t compete with a game that just doesn’t have a hungry audience. Games like puzzlers and platformers have to be very very very gorgeous to succeed. That is a rough market and you have to be the best to stand out. But if you make a crafty-buildy-simulationy or horror game, the audience is much more forgiving and willing to try something that isn’t AAA quality.

This is probably going to be a future blog post but I think one of the biggest reasons indie studios fail is that they don’t cancel their games as much as their AAA counterparts. They spend too long working on an idea that just doesn’t have “legs.” 

I also think mid-sized “double I” or “triple-I” teams have it the hardest. With every year you add to development and every person you add to your team, your net earnings potential drops dramatically.

If you have a big team, your game basically needs to be a Purple or Green worm to succeed. However, a small team has many more options for survivability. 

The amazing thing about Steam is that every year I see a lot of games made by small teams do amazingly well. They don’t have AAA level graphics, they aren’t using some sleazy pay-to-win monetization scheme to coerce money out of people. It is hard, but it is possible to succeed on Steam. Steam is not like the mobile market where I don’t even pay attention to it any more because it is overloaded with crap and basically whoever has the biggest ad budget wins. Steam is not becoming the mobile market.

In my next blog post I will be reviewing the games that did hit in 2023. Games that broke free of the sub-50 review basement so we can see what is trending.