Way Too Many Games Were Released On Steam In 2023

John Walker, reporting for Kotaku: Steam is by far the most peculiar of online storefronts. Built on top of itself for the last twenty years, Valve's behemothic PC game distributor is a clusterfuck of overlapping design choices, where algorithms rule over coherence, with 2023 seeing over 14,500 games released into the mayhem. Which is too many games. That breaks down to just under 40 a day, although given how people release games, it more accurately breaks down to about 50 every weekday. 50 games a day. On a storefront that goes to some lengths to bury new releases, and even buries pages where you can deliberately list new releases. Compared to 2022, that's an increase of nearly 2,000 games, up almost 5,000 from five years ago. There's no reason to expect that growth to diminish any time soon. It's a volume of games that not only could no individual ever hope to keep up with, but nor could even any gaming site. Not even the biggest sites in the industry could afford an editorial team capable of playing 50 games a day to find and write about those worth highlighting. Realistically, not even a tenth of the games. And that's not least because of those 50 games per day, about 48 of them will be absolute dross. On one level, in this way Steam represents a wonderful democracy for gaming, where any developer willing to stump up the $100 entry fee can release their game on the platform, with barely any restrictions. On another level, however, it's a disaster for about 99 percent of releases, which stand absolutely no chance of garnering any attention, no matter their quality. The solution: human storefront curation, which Valve has never shown any intention of doing.

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