Record-breaking year for Steam - more than 18,000 games launched on Valve's platform in 2024
This year a huge number of new games have appeared on Steam, exceeding 18,000. However, only a small part of them are considered „full-fledged” titles.
We have already learned about the most popular and profitable games on Steam in 2024. Additionally, each of us can generate a personal summary of the last 12 months, thanks to the recently launched Steam Replay. To add to this information, it's worthwhile to examine the number of games released on the Valve platform during this period, and there were really a lot of them.
Record number of new games
According to SteamDB, 18,897 new titles were released on Steam in 2023, surpassing last year's total of 14,311. It should be noted that the website divided them into "Games" and "Limited Games." There are only 3954 of the first ones, and 14 943 of the second ones.
The "limited" status is given to games that have the "Profile Features Limited" flag attached due to not meeting certain criteria, such as the number of players or sales. Such titles aren't included in the global achievement statistics and the number of games owned, and they cannot appear on some Steam Community profiles.
It's worth noting that this year's titles were more to the players' liking than those released in 2023. They spent 15% of their total gaming time with them, compared to last year's 9%.
The increasing number of games being released is therefore another proof of the constant expansion of the Valve store. This should be combined with the consistently broken records of users active at the same time. This last happened 12 days ago when 39,319,632 users were using Steam simultaneously. The result is slowly approaching the 40 million barrier.
As an interesting fact, it's worth mentioning that all of this is overseen by a relatively small group of employees, at least by industry standards. In 2021, Valve employed only 336 people, of whom only 79 were associated with Steam.
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