Throughout 2023, over 14,000 new games were launched on Steam, setting a new record on the platform for the fourth year in a row.
Among the data it keeps track of, SteamDB includes tallies of how many new releases are added to the Steam platform annually. That number has steadily grown every year, with 2023 seeing exactly 14,531 new additions, more than any other year.
This record has been consecutively broken since 2020, which saw 9,746 new Steam games. This was followed by 11,389 games in 2021 and 12,562 games in 2022. With 14,531 games in 2023, that’s an average of roughly 39 or 40 games released on Steam every day. Even discounting exclusives on other platforms, anyone who says there’s nothing to play nowadays doesn’t have a leg to stand on. In fact, it’s widely commented that 2023 alone has been a standout year for video games—at least in terms of the number of high-quality releases and not the rampant industry layoffs.
It’ll be interesting to see if this record is broken yet again by the end of 2024. We’re only two days into the year and SteamDB reports 37 new games have already launched on Steam, but not anything you’ll have likely heard. The first major launches of the year (at least on Steam) aren’t until Jan. 25, which sees the release of Tekken 8 and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. According to SteamDB’s calendar, roughly only 916 games are scheduled to launch this year, but that number could very easily rise as the months go by.
As for the games that have already come out, could any of them be a surprise success like Lethal Company or a sleeper hit waiting for the right Twitch streamer to catapult them to fame? So far, it’s not looking likely. The highest-rated 2024 Steam game at the time of writing is an FPS called Hamster Hunter. It has nothing but positive reviews, but there are only 29 of them, and its concurrent player count is in the single digits.
