Steam breaks record with over 18,000 new titles released in 2024
That's a lot of games to choose from.
How many of those are $0.99 hentai titles with like an hour of gameplay, though.
And how many are nearly entirely AI generated?
Idk, AI is usually very good at translation into English, and most of the translations are garbage.
None.
Only around 17,000 or so. The rest are minimum effort Unity asset flips.
I do appreciate that it used to be too much effort to get a game onto Steam, but this situation is hardly better.
My friend is a connoisseur, and he says both the quantity and quality has been declining this year.
A terrible, terrible for Steam and gooners gamers this year
Some of the most-played steam games are "Banana" and "Cats" where you literally click it every few hours and get steam item drops. Basically NFTs where people try to get rare items, but even more braindead because the developer, at any time can make more tokens.
Dude, I legit read that as "hentai titties" 😂
Also true
That's like 20 gameplay sessions for 99¢, that's only like 5¢ per.
Discoverability is a huge problem on Steam because there's so many games releasing, you can't really keep up.
18,000 games is almost 50 per day on average. That's 50 titles fighting for your attention and wallet every single day.
If you don't get noticed because you didn't spend half of your development budget on marketing, or your game didn't pick up well with influencers or more traditional media like reviews, you're just kinda fucked. No matter how good your game might be.
Speaking about quality, how many of those 18k titles were uninspiring, asset flipping slop?
It doesn't help that Steam store is a nightmare to navigate.
Releasing demos is a great way to succeed. It doesn't take me more than 5 minutes to decide if it's something I want to continue playing.
Putting videos of nothing but cut-scenes is a great way to ensure I keep scrolling but every title seems to take this approach.
The Steam Next Fest is how I found most of the good indie games I've played. Making a good demo will put you above 99% of the cruft out there.
I have picked up the same habit. I'll download and test a couple of dozen demos every next fest, and then wishlist/buy the ones that are good. I played 108 demos this year, and some of my favorite games this year were demos like this: Kill Knight, Last Plague Blight, Karate Survivor, Empty Shell...
Making a good game is one thing, making a huge amount of others want to play it is something else.
That's unironically the reason I don't even attempt to find games on Steam anymore.
I'll only go looking if I see a cool game in a YouTube video or see a cool article about something coming out soon that looks interesting. Otherwise, same.
It depends, sometimes I go down the rabbit hole on their "Games Like This" suggestions on my favorite games' store pages. I actually just found a cool one that way the other day called Ad Fundum. It was a funny coincidence since it came up suggested on a completely unrelated game, but I'd been wanting a game centered around digging underground.
But yeah, with literally over 100,000+ games on Steam, it's become way too difficult to find quality stuff that isn't AAA or indie games that struck it lucky with popular streamers giving them exposure. Which sucks for indie devs that actually put out their passion projects since it makes discoverability so hard, as others have pointed out here.
I've always found the "games like this" section to be so superficial that it very rarely actually has games which I'd consider to be similar to the one I'm looking at. Just looking at the store right now, for "Aquaria" which I really enjoy, it recommends Skyrim as a similar game. Sure they both are open world adventure RPGs... but I definitely would not consider them to be similar games.
All excellent, I'm sure.
How could the quality be anything but sterling with 50 new games each and every day?
Guys we have soooo much shovelware, asset flips and softcore porn that's barely a game. This is very much a good thing!!!
So much absolute garbage.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how many of those games aren't absolute shit and/or money grab scams?
0.001
That's what happens when you have a monopoly.
You act like Epic, GoG and itch.io don't exist. Steam has plenty of competition. They just suck in comparison.
What happens? Many games get released?
On a single platform. Giving a single company complete control over the marketplace, forcing any company looking to sell their game to a large audience to go through steam.
It’s because they got rid of their game standards
Do you seriously have nothing better to do on a holiday than just bash Valve? Jfc, go outside and touch grass you terminally online neckbeard
You ain't got to buy the game on there, you can get codes at other retailers
But steam is de facto PC store
You ain’t got to buy the game on there, you can get codes at other retailers
You actually can't buy the vast majority of Steam games elsewhere. 18,800 games released new this year on Steam. Do you know any legit retailers that even sell 18,000 games total?
It's something I've been noticing with all the routine seasonal complaining about sales on Steam not being worth looking at anymore... Sure, I don't only buy from Steam, but I do buy more from Steam than elsewhere, because those games--good games--just are not other places to be bought. So on the one hand, I see a lot of value from Steam sales and people shouldn't dis them so out of hand, but on the other, yeah Steam clearly controls the market. And that's not even getting into how Steam deliberately reduces the value-to-the-devs of your off-Steam purchases, so buying elsewhere keeps your purchase and reviews from helping the dev earn much needed Steam visibility.
So it's far from as simple as "You can just buy codes elsewhere".
