The number of games released on Steam could top 5,000 in 2017—the most ever in a single year

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More games released so far this year than in the whole of 2015

It's no wonder your Steam backlog keeps growing: the platform is releasing more games than ever before. According to analyst Daniel Ahmad, of Niko Partners, the number of games released on the platform so far this year has already surpassed the total for the whole of 2015.

Around 1,300 games have popped up since June's launch of Steam Direct, the replacement for Steam Greenlight that lets developers publish on Steam without passing through an approval process. If that pace carries on then the number of games released this year could top 5,000 for the first time.

That would mean there were more games released this year on Steam than in the eight years between 2006 and 2014. Pretty staggering.

I'm split on whether that's a good or bad thing. It means that a lot of dross gets through the net, and it can make it harder for the best titles to stand out in the growing crowd. But it also allows users to buy some real gems that may not have made it through Steam Greenlight, which saw users vote on titles that should be published. What do you think?

Cheers, PCGamesN.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.