Over 19,000 games have released on Steam in 2025, with nearly half seeing fewer than 10 reviews
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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 -
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One of those things people waste energy getting concerned about. Better than highly stringent curation that has no chance in being representative of all different taste/demographics. It's a more level playing field. Happened to music and books. Then video/movies. Video games followed quickly after. Better than the days of payments for every patch you push through Xbox live/PSN. Better than needing to get 35mm prints and access to theaters
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There's no downside for consumers, sucks if you are making art for an oversaturated market.
But that's why artists should get a UBI
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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.
Something I tried to do earlier to help with it, in this very channel, was a "Downvote any game you've heard of before" thread. It was a nice exercise to help people post odd games no one had heard of.
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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 immediatelyWell, that’d mean missing out on some really cool stuff.
Games like Vampire Survivors and Stardew Valley were made by a solo developer. A couple thousand bucks is a LOT of money for some people. I’d hate to have missed out on either of those.
We certainly do need some quality control, but I don’t think the financial route is the way to go.
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Well, that’d mean missing out on some really cool stuff.
Games like Vampire Survivors and Stardew Valley were made by a solo developer. A couple thousand bucks is a LOT of money for some people. I’d hate to have missed out on either of those.
We certainly do need some quality control, but I don’t think the financial route is the way to go.
it's a deposit though, you'd get it back pretty quickly if your game is halfway decent
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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 immediatelyWhat is there to be solved? It’s not a physical store with scant storage space. It has been solved by the store algorithm. Games that do well in the first week will rise to the front page and will get recommended to other customers, while crap will basically become invisible. Does it really matter that these crap games exist when you’ll rarely see them and the storage space they take up is insignificant to Valve’s bottom line. Like when was the last time you ever saw shovelware on the front page? If you see shovelware then the algorithm thinks you like that stuff. You can solve that by giving shovel ware in your library low reviews and by curating the queue.
Sure this will hurt some devs who made a hidden gem, but these devs would have failed in the physical retail space as well. Studios have the responsibility to do the leg work of promoting their own game. That’s not Steam’s job. The Steam algorithm will basically give each game some visibility during its first few days of release and if a game can’t generate sales momentum the algorithm will drop it and basically becomes invisible unless you search for it. Games that do well in that period get pushed to the recommendations. And no the threshold isn’t millions in sales it’s basically a couple of thousand copies in the first days.
Raising the fee would hurt devs on a budget, like devs outside high income countries and students.
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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.
My game Drone Perspective is one of those.
Such a good game, but I am a bit afraid that I can't turn it around. -
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.
10 reviews is basically statistical noise.
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There's no downside for consumers, sucks if you are making art for an oversaturated market.
But that's why artists should get a UBI
When I am supreme overlord, artists will get free food and housing. But like, it's gonna suck really bad because tortured artists make the best art.
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When I am supreme overlord, artists will get free food and housing. But like, it's gonna suck really bad because tortured artists make the best art.
We can just waterboard them
