Market & releases
How big Steam's catalogue actually is, what a game costs, and how much of each year's output ever reaches anybody.
How many games come out
Release counts are the number most often quoted about Steam, and on their own they are close to meaningless — they say how many products entered the store, not how many found a buyer. Read this chart together with the one further down, which splits the same years by how many reviews those games ever collected.
Counted are games with a release date that have actually come out; announced titles are excluded. DLC and demos never enter the database in the first place. The current year is still running and will look short.
Steam releases per year
Paid and free-to-play titles, stacked.
Based on 131,162 games.
Does the release month matter?
Releases per calendar month since 2015, with the share that reached at least 50 reviews. Bars use the left axis, the line the right.
Based on 108,978 games.
The autumn months carry the most releases and the summer the fewest, but the success rate barely moves with them — which is the interesting part. Picking a quiet month does not measurably help a game get seen.
How many of them are ever seen
This is the chart the release count hides. Each year's games are split by the number of reviews they have collected to date. The bottom band — games under ten reviews — is the part of Steam that exists only as a store page.
Reviews stand in for sales here; roughly 20 to 80 buyers leave one, which is why this site never quotes a single sales figure. Older years had more time to accumulate reviews, so the bottom band of recent years is somewhat overstated. See methodology.
Reviews reached, by release year
Share of each year's releases, stacked to 100%.
Based on 131,162 games.
What share of attention the biggest games take
Share of all reviews written for a release year that went to its largest titles.
Based on 120,157,753 games.
The top one percent of a year's releases collects the clear majority of that year's reviews. Steam is not a market where attention is spread thin — it is one where almost all of it lands on a few dozen titles.
What games cost
Distribution of launch prices
Paid games only, grouped into whole dollars. Everything above $60 is pooled.
Based on 111,314 games.
The fifteen most-used price points
The same games, ungrouped. Developers do not pick prices — they pick anchors.
Based on 111,314 games.
Median and average launch price per year
In US dollars, paid games only. The gap between the two lines is the skew: a handful of expensive software titles lifts the average, never the median.
Based on 111,314 games.
What kind of games
Games per genre
Steam lets a game carry several genres, so these add up to more than the size of the catalogue.
Based on 131,162 games.
The eight largest genres over time
Share of each year's releases carrying the genre. Click a legend entry to hide a line.
Based on 131,162 games.
Early Access share by release year
Careful with this one: it shows what carries the Early Access genre TODAY. A game that launched in Early Access in 2018 and finished in 2020 no longer counts, so older years read too low.
Based on 131,162 games.
Want this per niche instead of per platform? The niche radar breaks the same data down by tag combination →