More games released on Steam this year than whole of 2016
Steam Direct fails to halt over population as total number of games expected to exceed 6,000
More games have been released on Steam this year so far than the entire of 2016.
Niko Partners data analyst Daniel Ahmad revealed that 6,000 games will likely be released on the Steam Store by the end of this year. This is up from the 4,207 released in 2016, an increase of over 40% on the previous year.
The introduction of Steam Direct as a replacement for Greenlight saw a spike in the number of games released on the platform. After launching in June, it took only three months for over 1,300 new games to appear on the Steam Store.
During the first two months of Steam Direct, the number of games released in the same period last year doubled, and saw an increase of 146% when compared to 2015. Last week alone saw the release of 88 new games, according to data from ICO Partners.
Curating the content which appears on Steam has been problematic for some time, leaving Valve seemingly unable to find a solution that both caters to consumers and protects the interests of developers.
Steam Direct, which was supposedly intended to help combat the issue, failed to prevent a drop in revenue for indie developers. Data from SteamSpy's Sergey Galyonkin found that the average first month sales were down by 39% since 2015, and average naive revenue down by almost 50%.