Ask anyone who is a player, pundit, worker or analyst what the biggest threat to a video game’s potential success in 2026 is and you’ll get a whole spectrum of answers, ranging from a fixation on short-term earnings by the executive class to the cost-of-living crisis. One thing most would agree on though would be: there are simply too many video games.
When you look out over the industry as a whole–andSteam in particular, since that’s where so many of the total number of customers, global studios and businesses are operating–and see the sheer volume of games being released, it’s not hard seeing the reason so many releases, even very good ones, are being overlooked and are sinking beneath the waves.
Take last week (and this is data from ICO Partners CEO Thomas Bidaux,as reported by GI.biz) for example, when 720 games were released on Steam. 720 new video games, in just seven days. That’s a new record for the platform,though much like climate milestones, it’s one that currently exists only to soon be broken.
The number of games releasing on Steam has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2019 just over 8000 were released, according to figures posted by SteamDB. By 2025, that figure was over 21,000. And while there are caveats to that increase–a sizeable percentage of them are what Steam calls ‘Limited Games’, meaning nobody buys or reviews them–it’s still a figure that makes discoverability and exposure an absolute nightmare.
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Why is this aproblem? Loads of reasons! For developers, a game that took a team of people years to make can disappear without a trace. For players, you could miss a game perfectly suited for you. And even for Valve, it’s becoming a quality control issue, as Steam’s new release section becomes overwhelming.
Ever take a look at Steam’s ‘New Releases’ tab in its entirety lately? It looks like this:
Yikes.
While Valve to their credit keeps trying to find ways to help players hack through all this scrub, like the Discovery Queue and, more recently, the addition of a “Personal Calendar” feature (which is pictured up top), there’s no amount of curation or guidance that can hope to cut through thatmany releases.
Take the Personal Calendar, for example; while noble in intent, and certainly useful in some cases, for the most part even this supposedly laser-targeted discoverability feature is still recommending 2-4 games to me every day. Every day! I do not have the time in my life to play that many games even if I wanted to, and my job involves playing video games. Someone who is out of the house for 10 hours a day, and who is most likely suffering through a cost-of-living crisis, couldn’t even scratch the surface.
Meaning that multiple times every day a game that I could have maybe loved, and more importantly for its developers spent money on, drops off my radar and into oblivion. The next day it will happen again. And each time it happens, sure, you might catch a glimpse of an AI-riddled slopfest sliding off into sunset, but you might also have missed out on a hidden gem, an underrated treasure that you might otherwise have loved if only it had been given more time–or even anytime–in the spotlight.
There’s no fix here for the quantity of games being released. I am not (and nobody should be) the Video Game Police; this is just what the industry looks like now, thanks to more affordable game-making tools and the reduced scope of so many titles in this increasingly post-AAA era. Nobody is going to be able to stop so many people and so many studios from making games.
But the simple fact is that while the number of games available on Steam increases exponentially, the number of people buyingthem is not (or at least at nowhere near the same rate as they’re being released), nor are the number of hours we have free in the day to play them or the amount of money we have spare to buy them.
There’s a bottleneck in the market, one that’s being squeezed ever tighter by the week, and if nobody is going to be able to slow the number of games being released–a trend that was shooting upwards even before AI reduced the barrier to entry–the only avenue left to try to improve things for all of us, the people playing and making games, is discoverability. Helping the right games find the right audience.
And I don’t mean asking Valve to fix an existing system, or create a new one. Between its various charts, Discovery Queue, Personal Calendar and Wishlists, Steam is already bristling with attempts at curating this firehose, and as we’ve already seen they don’t work so great.
Half the problem here is that tens of thousands of games are being pushed onto a single global storefront, which when you step back and think about is absolutely insane. We rightfully complain about subscription fatigue, but imagine if every TV show on the planet was forced onto a single streaming platform–it would be an absolute nightmare (anyone who has ever tried towade through a Fire Stick will know the feeling). For all of TV’s issues, at the very least I know that I can open up Apple TV, Netflix and my local TV stations (ABC and SBS especially) and appreciate that I’ll be offered, and be looking for, different and unique stuff on each.
I know there are a ton of conveniences associated with Steam, like the fact it works, has big sales and keeps your library in one place, but between its unreasonable 30% cut of most games and this discoverability bottleneck, it’s also becoming clear that the world could really do with a few more options when it comes to PC shopfronts.
Like yes, there is GOG (also very good for owningyour games), Epic was trying pretty hard there for a while and some major publishers have gambled on opening their own stores, but until we live in a world with at least 1-2 majorcompetitors to Steam, this is a problem that’s only going to get worse. I don’t know how you do that! Maybe regional stores? Shopfronts catering to specific genres or types of game?
If I did know, you can bet I’d be keeping my damn mouth shut andworking on a way to get a slice of an $11 billion pie. All I know is that we need to do something, because pretty soon we’ll be looking at 40,000 video games coming out in a calendar year, and if they’re all trying to squeeze onto Steam I don’t even know what that looks like beyond “God help us all”.
