38 Percent of Steam Games Were Released in 2016

John Williamson / 8 years ago

Steam

The Steam platform has revolutionised PC gaming and allowed indie developers to release quirky, innovative titles in a direct manner. Honestly, the PC gaming community should consider Valve as the company which pushed their favourite platform forward and helped to make it such a resounding success. In particular, the community features and huge sales speak for themselves. Of course, Steam isn’t without its share of problems and Valve’s customer service is pretty dreadful. Nevertheless, the platform’s audience continues to grow and has a huge number of games being added each day.

According to Steam Spy, 38 percent of all the games currently on Steam were released in 2016. This compares with 26% in 2015 and 16% in 2014. As you can see from the pie chart below, the library is growing each year and makes the period between 2005-2012 look quite barren. Whether this is purely down to consumers embracing indie games on a mass scale or loads of mobile shovelware ports arriving on Steam remains to be seen. Personally, I think it’s a combination of both and the huge number does limit a game’s discoverability. As a result, cult classics or games which deserve recognition might be lost amongst the other releases. Granted, the ability to choose from a mammoth library is most welcome and ensures Steam users can find something they like within different genres.