Over 19,000 games have released on Steam in 2025, with nearly half seeing fewer than 10 reviews
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An unfortunate 'secret' for most indie titles is that the vast majority of their sales are on discount, usually during launch or one of the big week long sales. Not a lot of people buy indie games at full sticker price unless its a pretty high quality title.
So your $200K net revenue would be at absolute max, but is realistically ~50-80% of that.
That's fair. A blended net revenue per unit figure of $10 might actually be high.
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How often do people leave reviews? I rarely see a profile with +100 reviews.
I only leave reviews after 100% completion or a lot of time (hundreds of hours) in case of fighting games where sometimes 100% is ridiculously difficult to attain (oh hi, Plus R)
I think the average time between my picking up a game and leaving a review is like 3~12 months. Definitely even more if I'm not vibing with the game.
I'll click the thumbs up button then get intimidated by the text box that pops up. I'm not mentally prepared to give out a useful review.
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I'll click the thumbs up button then get intimidated by the text box that pops up. I'm not mentally prepared to give out a useful review.
Same. I'm often in the process of breaking down why I like/dislike the game, what works about it, and what doesn't as I'm playing. I can't give honest feedback with incomplete thoughts.
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I think this statistic would be more interesting if it filtered out all of the blatant cash-grab, asset-flip, AI generated shit that makes up a large portion of new releases.
Is it 19,000 releases with 10,000 actual sincere efforts at making a game, or 19,000 releases with 1,000 actual games.
And what's the average number of reviews for actual games versus garbage?
I don't think that's trivial to filter.
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Anyone doing a uBlock for Steam?
Steamdb lets you filter out games with less than x reviews which I’ve made liberal use of over the years.
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Haven't you heard. Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably.
Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games. Humble bundle? Runs sales events where these games get showcased. Itch.io's whole schtick is selling indie games.
It's nice that Valve gives studios a platform to help market their games and all that, and yes, by dint of being one of the largest gaming sale platforms out there launching on steam helps their chances. But most of them weren't ever gonna reach the success of AAA titles regardless and we pretend that that's Valve's fault for reasons I have never understood.
It's the same problem with each of the online stores including the Nintendo E-Shop. Your game still has to be decent and be marketed to the people who want to play it.
Additionally they have to have time to play it. Which means you're fighting every other game in the category in order to claim each players time.
There's a whole lot to making and marketing a successful game at literally every level and not every studio can be a Team Cherry.
Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably. Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games.
Those two things aren't opposed though. Launching on Steam doesn't guarantee success, but I believe what they're claiming is that not launching on Steam more or less guarantees its failure.
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10 reviews means like 500-1000 sales. The vast majority of people dont leave reviews. Not much, especially for low priced games, but also not nothing. As long as you enjoyed the game making process and didnt invest anything except for time its not really an issue.
10 reviews means the developer has some combination of the following:
- friends/family/classmates
- developers on the actual game
- multiple Steam accounts with the same owner
10 is essentially 0 and cannot be extrapolated into sales.
I agree that if game development is a hobby and not a career, this isn't a problem for those developers.
I also submit that if you are attempting to make money from your efforts and don't yet have a following, and can't afford a marketing budget, and have actually made something unique, interesting, or otherwise worthwhile, it is more difficult to stand out in a market whose signal to noise ratio is continuously and exponentially growing noisier.
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Oh, no! Competition in the games industry causing the slop to fall to the bottom! We better ban steam immediately put everything behind a walled guardian and have "AAA" companies be the only ones allowed to publish! What if the plebs start making money? Then what?
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Same. I'm often in the process of breaking down why I like/dislike the game, what works about it, and what doesn't as I'm playing. I can't give honest feedback with incomplete thoughts.
I just say "I like it", it's not very helpful but at least it counts for the rating
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Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably. Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games.
Those two things aren't opposed though. Launching on Steam doesn't guarantee success, but I believe what they're claiming is that not launching on Steam more or less guarantees its failure.
I can definitely understand why not selling a game on the most popular marketplace would detrimentally affect a studios ability to make money.
But a lot of the reason games aren't successful has as much to do with the quality of the game and the amount of money spent developing it as it does with marketing. And plenty of developers/small indie studios assume that they can
ouvertover-stretch themselves monetarily and with other resources like time, and still come out on top because Indies are becoming more popular.But what it often comes down to is if what you're selling is worth it to the consumer and they know about it. On steam an indie game is just as likely to get caught up in the influx of games and lost in the noise as it is to get noticed.
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"game" is a big stretch for a lot of the asset flip or AI trash that is currently on steam.
AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.
However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being "the dev doesn't really care about making money". Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn't pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.
Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.
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Anyone doing a uBlock for Steam?
I personally stick to searching by specific tags to find the hidden good stuff.
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How often do people leave reviews? I rarely see a profile with +100 reviews.
I only leave reviews after 100% completion or a lot of time (hundreds of hours) in case of fighting games where sometimes 100% is ridiculously difficult to attain (oh hi, Plus R)
I think the average time between my picking up a game and leaving a review is like 3~12 months. Definitely even more if I'm not vibing with the game.
How often do people leave reviews?
Speaking only for myself, I only leave a review if I loved or I hated a game. A "meh" game doesn't get a review. I'd hazard that many people do something similar.
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Depends on the genre and how popular the game is.
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Oh, no! Competition in the games industry causing the slop to fall to the bottom! We better ban steam immediately put everything behind a walled guardian and have "AAA" companies be the only ones allowed to publish! What if the plebs start making money? Then what?
Slop falls to the bottom but I bet a lot of hidden gems do too. The greater volume of games coming out, the harder it’ll be for individual developers to get recognized!
Old school indie developer Jeff Vogel has a whole talk about how difficult it is.
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I don't think that's trivial to filter.
I don't disagree. It would require manual labelling by a group of people with enough patience and understanding of gaming to be able to reliably label ~60 new games every day. I'd have thought that the Steam community was large enough to achieve this though.
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AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.
However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being "the dev doesn't really care about making money". Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn't pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.
Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.
The developer of Mind Over Magnet did a post mortem video where he covered among other things how much of gross he kept after paying the artists he hired, paid for things like assets, and after taxes, and it was about 43%. A very lazy search yielded somewhere around $300k in total sales on Steam, meaning he took home $129k. So yeah, not a bad chunk of change, but it's not exactly changing social class or long term working conditions.
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Oh, no! Competition in the games industry causing the slop to fall to the bottom! We better ban steam immediately put everything behind a walled guardian and have "AAA" companies be the only ones allowed to publish! What if the plebs start making money? Then what?
Competition in the games industry causing the slop to fall to the bottom!
Do you really believe that markets and competition creates better products and services? How do you square that with basic observations about how the world is? If success was linked to quality, then Subway would be the worlds best food; Clash of Clans the best video game; and Tesla the best car.
The markets of the world say that Nvidia is worth more than the Pharmaceutical Industry.
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big part of the ones with almost no reviews are such garbage its insulting to even call them games. But i bet there are some gems buried in there too.
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big part of the ones with almost no reviews are such garbage its insulting to even call them games. But i bet there are some gems buried in there too.
can't help but feel like this could be solved by increasing the deposit to a couple thosuand $'s or something.
worst of the shovelware would become unprofitable immediately
