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Over 5,000 games released on Steam this year didn't make enough money to recover the $100 fee to put a game on Valve's store, research estimates (www.gamesradar.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by cm0002@lemmy.zip to c/steam@programming.dev

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Don't bother sitting down because you'll just stand up when you hear this: a ton of games were released on Steam this year. Valve's store has seen nearly 13,000 game launches since January 1, 2025, according to Steam data hound Gamalytic, and a majority of those games went straight under the couch to be forgotten for the rest of time like lost batteries.

Gamalytic regularly updates its data but these particular milestones and thresholds were recently flagged on social media by Artur Smiarowski, creator of turn-based roguelike RPG Soulash and its markedly more popular sequel Soulash 2. As of today, Steam has seen an estimated 12,732 games released in 2025.

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[–] Mikina@programming.dev 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

The market situation is really difficult, unless you are really really lucky. We've continued with a college project and eventually managed to release a hand-drawn coop top-down shooter, around 2 hours of story-based gameplay, that was locally pretty successful as far as marketing goes - we were in local national television, have several "best indie game" awards from conferences, even including Czech Game of the Year in student category. We had czech streamers playing the game, had reviews and even were featured in a Microsoft article about student gamedev, and we were featured in the New and Noteworthy on Steam for quite a bit.

We've eventually managed to get around 6000 wishlists, and the reception was generally positive.

After almost half a year after realease, we have only dozens of sales.

We don't have any investors we own money to, and never really made it for profit, but it is still difficult to see 6 years of your work that you though was going pretty well end up like this. I'm not really surprised, because it is local-multiplayer only story based game (although Steam Remote works), which will limit the target audience size by quite a bit, but I definitely won't be ever making a game where I expect that it will sell, and rather focus on smaller experiements, gamejams, and making games for making games sake.

Tying money into your gamedev is a recipe for disappointment.