Showing just how insane it is to be a game developer right now, we’ve hit an all-time high for game releases on Steam in 2025 and not many get seen.
Taken from SteamDB, we can see from their data that there’s been 19,008 games for 2025. That is a lot of games to be launching in a single year, which is up from 18,558 games in 2024 and 14,111 in 2023. This is a reminder that developers are not just competing with new releases when launching a game, but everything on Steam with many older titles remaining incredibly popular.
Showing just how difficult it can be to actually get a game in front of an audience, of the 19,008 from this year, a whopping 9,269 games have 10 or fewer reviews. There is a slight silver lining here though, as it appears the number of games receiving at least 100 reviews have been growing over the years since 2020. It’s a bit lower than 2024 right now, but that will likely even-out before the end of 2025.
Anyone have hidden gems released in the last couple years they can recommend?
Toem, Ghost of a Tale, Lost in Random, We Were Here
I’m sure that these are gems, but they are not hidden; going by Steamdb, these games are all in the top 3% most popular games on Steam, based on the total number of reviews:
- Toem: 9,500 reviews on Steam
- Ghost of a Tale: 5,000 reviews on Steam
- Lost in Random: 5,000 reviews on Steam
- We Were Here: 31,000 reviews on Steam
Almost forgot: I don’t think that I can name a truly hidden gem, but Deathbulge is pretty good and has a mere 360 reviews on Steam. Which is still more than the vast majority of indies, of course.
I’m not sure if the takeaway about it being hard to be a game developer is accurate. Because I know for a fact that there are some really low-effort games that get released on Steam (I’ve seen some), and I would assume that there are a lot more of such games that I have not seen. I don’t know what percentage of those 19,000 games are low-effort slop, but it could be significant, and if those slop games get low engagement it’s just the system working as intended.
Yeah, I think the more accurate take is that it’s way easier to get a game published now. These days they die on Steam. 20 years ago they’d die before making it that far.
I wonder how many are school projects that are now abandoned
Kind of sad to think about. Some creative soul might decide to start working on a game, only for it to slip under the radar.
To be fair, most of my Steam library consist of games from the 80s/90s, so maybe I’m contributing to the problem, whoops. 😅
Eh, the problem is inherent to how this particular market works. Once a game is developed, the cost to distribute it further are negligible compared to the development costs. This also means that a single game can, theoretically, satisfy the entire market. Hence, at any given time, only small percentage of games are successful.
