“There’s just no games nowadays.” Really? No games at all? Stand back while I peel away the wall like SpongeBob in the episode where he and Patrick co-parent a clam, and reveal almost 20,000 Steam releases in the year 2024 alone.
That’s according to SteamDB (as spotted by PCGamer), which reveals that – at the time of writing – in 2024 there have been 18,949 releases on Steam in this year alone. Compared to last year, we’ve seen an increase of more than 4000 total releases, as since 2021 the amount of games hitting Steam has been steadily increasing.
The increase of limited games seems to be the leading factor in why we’re seeing so many releases. According to SteamDB, limited games have the “profile features limited” flag, which means that players can’t customise their profiles from those games.
Once games reach certain player and sales metrics, they can allow players to customise their profiles. This year, 10,434 of the total games launched were limited, with 3,876 being fully fledged releases.