Almost 40% of Steam games are 2016 releases!

2016 has been one hell of a ride, even for the gaming industry. For game marketplaces, it is very crowded as usual. Recently, pub trivia and business development resource Steam Spy has posted an interesting chart, that broke down Steam games by year of release. The result looks very interesting, astonishing even. For example, in 2012, only 379 games were released on Steam. However, in 2016, that number has jumped to 4207, almost 14 times!

Third-party games first appear on the service way back in 2005. It is understandable that the numbers would increase year by year, and explode in recent years, as a result of digital explosion. This is not yet counting the Greenlight games, or Early Access. Even with other competition entering the market, such as Green Man Gaming, Origin, Steam has retained its top spot as a game vendor. This is a big success for Steam as well, but it also indicates some hidden problems for the platform as well.

You could probably guess by looking at the number of release and navigating through Steam’s new releases section, Valve has pretty much given up on controlling what games gets to be on Steam. Developers has considered Steam to be their gold mine. Of course, Valve has attempted to filter out unnecessary games for players throughout the year as well, and the most recent is its design change. There are also the Steam Curators system to filter out garbage as well. If you somehow don’t want to use the filter system, your new releases column would look like above!

Steam games: There are many, but most of them filtered out

You actually don’t have to worry too much about this, as Steam has done a pretty good job of filtering out garbage for each user. So just continue shopping happily with Steam!