Steam closes 2024 with nearly 19,000 games released, 32.5% more than last year

Over the next few weeks, Valve will surely offer us some statistics on Steam’s performance during 2024, but there is one that we already know and that we can consider closed today. This is the number of games that have been put on sale this year, a figure that according to steamdb is around 19,000 launches, 32.5% more than in 2023.

In all of 2024, 18,965 games have been put up for sale on Steam, a number that could still rise during the last few hours of the year. The figure is notable if we compare it with the titles that arrived in the Valve store in previous years, from the 70 games released in 2006 to the 14,310 games that debuted in 2023. The turning point is found between 2016 and 2017, when which Steam Direct was launched, a tool inherited from Greenlight that made it much easier to publish games on a digital platform.

Four years ago, 9,686 games were released on Steam, which is just over half of the titles that will be on sale in 2024.

Despite the fact that almost 20,000 games will have been released on Steam this year, it is difficult to get the feeling that so many titles have been released, and that is because most of them go unnoticed. While the number of releases is at a record high, just over 20% of games, or about 4,000 titles, were popular enough for Steam to enable profile features. This feature allows you to create content (cards, badges, backgrounds, emoticons…) that players can use, and is automatically awarded to games that have achieved wide player participation and some commercial successes.

In other words, about 80% of the nearly 20,000 games that have been released in 2024 on Steam have not been popular enough to have profile features.

On the other hand, now that the year is ending you can also take a look at the new top rated games by Steam users in 2024. In this list it is striking that little-known names such as MiSide, Sheepy: A Short Adventure, Webfishing and The WereCleaner appear in the top positions. Among the top ten we also have Balatro, Satisfactory and Black Myth: Wukong, which are three titles that many more people recognize.