STEAM® 2024 By The Numbers

With corrections and deconstructions

Jan 13, 2025

Original image credit goes to b0red on pixabay.

TL;DR — 19.7% of all games available on STEAM® were shipped in 2024

INTRO

In June of 2024 I got interested in using data from STEAM® to see if there was support for my speculation on a driver of the boom and bust cycle in game development: overproduction of studios, and hence games, resulting from unrestrained overinvestment in the sector.

My investigation of publicly accessible data sources left me unsatisfied with the lack of details, and trying to extract details with a tedious and probably unrepeatable manual process seemed like a bad idea.

So, I decided to roll my own data pipeline automation for the STEAM® public APIs and share with you all my spelunking of that STEAM® data sea. Or maybe the relics of my archaeology.

Mixing metaphors may not be my strong suit, but wherever you go, there you are.

CORRECTIONS AND REFINEMENTS

There are no manuals for these APIs so I had to reverse engineer and deconstruct based on the 200,000+ initial data files together with some hints from the interwebs. Deeper dives brought that to around 600,000 files after scraping other pages.

From the data for January through June of 2024 I extrapolated that STEAM® would reach 100,000 applications labelled as ‘game’ by the end of the year. My numbers didn’t match up with other data sources exactly, but that number seemed solid.

Half way through December I followed up that analysis and refined the number to 100,771.

The data shown with ⭐️ and 🔺 in the plot represent data collected through June 30, 2024. The current total is plotted with a 🟣.

I know, that’s laughably precise. But — and there’s always a but — I learned things along the way:

Not all STEAM® applications labelled ‘game’ in the data stream are actual games. Some are game demos masquerading as games, or special playtest builds that may only be available to the dev teams.
Some ‘game’ entries have publication dates with a quarter designation, like 2024 Q4. I interpreted these to land on the last day of that quarter, so for Q4 that would be December 31st.
Not all games will be visible to everyone who logs in to the STEAM® service depending on their country of origin and age.
Not all months are equally popular for game launches.

I needed to address the first two to give a more accurate number because, during the 2003-2024 time frame, there were over 5700 ‘game’ applications that, based on keyword matches in the title, were either DEMOs or PLAYTESTs.

And when I updated my data at the end of the December, hundreds of games originally marked as Q4 were suddenly in 2025. And not Q1 of 2025. Laggards. Slackers.

There was also a handful of ‘game’ entries that were missing data, like a title, but appear to have been ‘published’. I just left those out entirely.

FINAL(?) RESULTS

The question mark caveat is because these numbers change, literally, every day. Games that were available sublimate into the aether. Others have their publication date time travel into the future.

Drum roll. On December 31st, 2024, STEAM® data had the following statistics.

94,460 ‘game’ applications had titles that did not include DEMO or PLAYTEST
18,636 of these games — 19.7% — were shipped in 2024
21.3% of games shipped in 2024 — 3963 — will be UNLIMITED

Not being tagged as Profile Features Limited or some variation of the phrase “STILL LEARNING” means the game has been blessed by STEAM® as ‘good quality’. Because many games are still under evaluation, the number 3963 was calculated in the following way:

12997 games have been labelled as Profile Features Limited
3511 games have been blessed
over 2100 are still tagged “Steam is learning about this game” or some variation thereof

Using the decisions STEAM® already made during 2024 we apportion the “still learning” group via the ratio 3511/(3511+12997) = 0.213.

It’s true that most of STEAM®’s “learning” will complete/converge in the next few months, but I’m not that patient. ;)

In any case, that’s a lot of ‘quality’ games to consider playing in a single year.

CONCLUSION

I’m not sure I can emphasize this enough. At the end of 2024:

19.7% of all games available on STEAM® were shipped in 2024

And of those, we can expect:

21.3%, or 3936 of 2024’s shipped games will be blessed by STEAM®’s quality algorithm

Repeating myself may seem a bit jerky, but I think we can rest the case of whether overproduction of games — even just quality games — is a real thing. And I don’t know how we could get there without overinvestment.

METHODOLOGY

All data discussed here is for STEAM® applications labeled as a ‘game’ with a publication date between 2003-01-01 and 2024-12-31 and where the ‘coming soon’ flag has a value of false. All game data dates using the QUARTER format were placed on the last day of that quarter.