Nearly 19,000 games released on Steam in 2024

Nearly 19,000 videogame products released on Steam this year—18,945 as of press time, meaning if 50-some things get dropped before January 1, 2025 my headline there turns into a lie but whatever I'm going for it. Where was it?

Oh, right, what the hell? That is a lot of game releases. According to ever-reliable stat tracker SteamDB, that's our total for the year, and that is a lot. Like, a whole 5,600 more than 2023 which was itself a few thousand higher than 2024. It means that 2024 is what appears to be the highest single-year jump in game releases ever tracked on Steam with no signs of the flood slowing down. More games than ever, faster than ever.

Despite the onrushing tide of games, only a few more of them made the threshold of popularity that Valve requires for community profile features to get enabled—that's when they can have profile customization like trading cards, badges, and emoticons, and when they count towards a user's Game Collector and Achievement Collector totals.

Just 3,964 games reached that total compared to 3,874 in 2023 and 3,491 in 2021—with the number dropping by a few hundred for years before that. So there are more games than ever, but only a few more of them than ever are getting noticed and played by the community.

SteamDB also has their filtered list of the best-rated games of 2024 available, where you can see that people really love Balatro, but that's probably something you already knew, isn't it? That's followed up by MiSide, WEBFISHING, The WereCleaner, Sheepy, Satisfactory, Black Myth: Wukong, TCG Card Shop Simulator, Fields of Mistria, and 20 Small Mazes.

The takeaway from that list is that if you want recognition you should just put a lot of time and effort into a nice game and give it away for free.