As you can see from about 2020 onwards, there was an absolute DELUGE of trash games. Of course the majority of games aren't going to make anything, Steam makes zero effort to curate anything. A thousand games can get released per day and the vast vast majority of them you never even notice.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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OP, can you link the original research? It's an excellent site:
Would think that could apply to most markets. Almost the weird 80-20 "rule" that goes for most things.
This isn't the shocking statement they think it is.
Arguably more striking is the rate of Steam's growth. "Steam's catalogue grew faster than its revenue," the report says, and this has seen those earning extremes widen. A massive 19,714 games were released on Steam in 2024, and 2025 passed even that at 23,107.
Go back just five years and Steam looks very different with 7,427 games released in 2018 – more than even 2019, and the highest on record at the time. 2026 has already doubled that at 15,814 games released, and the year still has several busy months ahead of it.
How many of this are AI garbage? It seems like no coincidence that the number of games corresponds to the increased AI push.
I would love to know how this breaks down with you cut out all the slop products.
Maybe I’ve been lucky but I didn’t see AI garbage games in Steam yet.
However, ultra low quality copycats or “XYZ Simulator” with barebones scenarios and basic assets have been flooding Steam for years.
The adult category is even worse, very badly made games, some clearly being taken from a tutorial for learning the game engine, sparkled with some few hentai images in the background and sold by a very low price.
Yup, asset flips have been a problem for over a decade. Nothing to do with AI.
I think this is really where it's at. If this article was supposed to criticize Steam, the criticism should be that they will need to do better QA to fend off the waves of crappy AI (or otherwise low-quality) games in the future that are beginning to inflate the catalog, and not an economic one that makes this sound like some uneven distribution of wealth (which it really is not).
80-20 rule still holds true, huh?
It is not news to me that a handful of games have the most players, also considering people put low effort garbage on all stores constantly I don’t think the bottom 90% deserve anything
Did they include AI slop, dogshit mobile game ports, low effort games, and the like in the dataset? If so, I'm not surprised.
I think its unfortunate because there's a lot of games that fall into that next ~15-25% that are decently good games (though sometimes flawed) but won't make enough to let the developers survive a second game.
That being said I don't think there is a particularly easy solution, and to Valve's credit, they have tried unique approaches to combat this, but it's still a problem.
I agree. It’s not a platform issue it’s a market saturation issue. You see this in many fields where the product is frequently a passion project. (Mostly art, music etc.) Some people will keep creating regardless of the earnings and throw the stats. Not that the stats really matter. Not much you can do… aside from UBI.
A lot of games on Steam hold zero interest to me. AI is just the newest form of slop. Beyond that what I see is a hell of a lot more games are being released in the last 4 years. That means more competition but also many have not been around long enough to build up over time revenue. To a certain extent you are comparing life time revenue to launch revenue. On AAA that probably doesn't matter as much but on the lesser hyped indy games I think it would be an important distinction.