Were there too many games in 2024?

[Music] hey welcome this is my annual review of steam this is the Year 20124 Chris sukowski here from how tomarket game.com I'm going to teach you everything that I kind of saw by Deep diving deep deep deep into the numbers for 2024 okay so let me let me let me show you exactly what's going on here this is this is going to be good this is going to be a great presentation here um people always freak out because they always say oh blah blah blah blah this many games released on Steam every year okay so this is 2024 um looks like this 18,23 4 games released within 2024 and this is the chart of every year they kind of since opened up steam so it's like all the way down here and you can see kind of bump up and then all of a sudden huge Spike up in the last two years years now I'm worried about it too

I'm worried for you because you're trying to make your own game and all that kind of stuff so what I did back in 20122 is I said every January I am going to snapshot what is going on on Steam and then see if I can see the trends see what's going on whether the games are going up too much because I was like man that's a lot of games I should see what's going on and so I've been watching it every year and this is a big spike all right that's a pretty big spike here's what here's what I generally see okay so when I deep dive into the numbers what I did was I looked at I broke it down like how many games reached every type of review now this is January 23rd like January 3rd is when I like took this snapshot here and so this snapshot these will change okay like if you look at all the games and you see it some of these will change a little bit and that's just just the nature of people buying and reviewing games but on January 3rd every year I snapshot it and I can see how many games have earned 0

to n reviews how many have earned 10 to 50 all that kind of stuff all the way up to 1,000 reviews and what I see and you can see it here in the chart so this is 2015 and then every year it gets more and more and more and more I went back in time to get the snapshots here not not physical time but I just went back I use VG insights VG insights is a great service um and I use it to find all this data okay now what I did was I looked at how many games that were released that year have only earned zero to nine reviews how many of you have earned 10 to 5050 and what you'll see is most of this growth year-over-year that's makes people go oh oh my God 18,000 released uh has been in this market of0 to 50 reviews this this color is 50 or less most of the growth is zero to 50 people or 50 reviews now that sounds like a lot and if this is your first game getting 50 reviews is a win 0 to n if you have not earned 10 reviews you are basically super duper invisible Steam and that

means you know typically hobbyists and it's a good goal for your first game but if you're serious and you're trying to make money you're trying to do this is a full-time job most of steam are these games that the algorithm is never going to show you're never going to see these games and that's what steam is right now okay I took just this is just 24 2024 broke it down this is that chart but like turned into a circle uh just for this year though and you'll see that 75% of all games on Steam have not broken through to that zero to 50 reviews 50 reviews or more now you could be saying well steam's so overloaded you can't get it I in my opinion if you Market well and that means getting that 7,000 wish list before you launch reaching out to streamers getting a demo if you do the basic strategy which I always teach at how to Market a game.com you can get into this this upper quarter okay 75% of games on Steam are in my

opinion hobbyist they just upload the game throw it out there and hope for the best or they don't even care about the best they're just like I just this is just my hobby and that is totally fine if you're a hobbyist I salute you way to go hobbyist um but if everybody else if you're like I want to quit my job you got to be in this 25% this people who actually get reviews who work hard get the uh get their marketing going try and get that demo out all that kind of stuff that's for you this is you okay so it's a scary number but like 18,000 reviews or 18,000 games released in a year but it's not impossible because most of them aren't there it's it's there and in my opinion it's pretty consistent the games that are very serious the number of games that are like serious we're trying to make money we're trying to make a full-time living off of this we're not intending to get millionaire Rich we just we just want to do this full time right quit the day job do this full time it's not growing as fast as you would think if just looked at the Baseline

number of 18,000 okay and let me show you what I mean by this okay the other thing I do when I wake up you know wipe the sleep out of my eyes January first week of January take my snapshot of steam see all the games I do a filter and I look for all the games that got a thousand reviews how many games earned a thousand reviews now why a thousand okay um it's hard to get a thousand reviews that is serious game Victory if you can get your game to get reviewed a thousand times now before I get into this there's nothing magic in the algorithm about thousand reviews don't post on Reddit that a thousand that Chris said a thousand reviews means anything it's a correlation not causation okay I just kind of picked a thousand out of the air because a thousand is a nice round number it says it's easy to say 1,000 but there's kind of a little bit of a a number here so you might know you the basic way to estimate sales is you take a, reviews you multiply by 30 or you

take the number of reviews multiply by 30 that's how many units were sold multiply it by the price and then you get the total the average price for all games released in 2024 was $15 and so if you take a game that had a th reviews multiply by 30 multiply by 15 you get $450,000 that's that's serious money I'm talking to serious people who are trying to really make a game but even if your game's a little cheaper like I'm only release it for N9 which is another major Milestone a lot of people release game for $9 that's still $270,000 so my in my opinion once you get to about $250 thereabouts amount earned revenue and I'm talking Gross pream cut valve says you've got something here kiddo we are gonna promote you we think there's something in your game and the the steam algorithm lifts that game up okay and so by me saying I'm going to look at the games that earned a th000

reviews that is me looking at the games that steam likes that the players really engage with it is hard to get to a th reviews so if I can look at just the Thousand reviews I can start pulling out like what are people really looking at and I kind of call this like working the maze backwards like you know how easy it is to solve a maze if you start at the finish and you work backwards I'm kind of doing that for 2024 and I do that for every year 23 2022 I do the maze backwards I'm like what succeeded what types of games let's look at the types of games see what we got there now in my data I also do free games because people say well free game is so easy to do a thousand it is not my friend it is not kiddo um when you have free games there were 4,857 released in 2024 only three of those 3% of this 485 thou 4800 48 00 actually got a th000 reviews

it is hard in my opinion your game has to be something special to get to a thousand even I've seen big Publishers who've invest a lot of money in a game if the game didn't have something awesome about it it didn't get up to a th no matter how much ads they bought no matter what they did there is something magic right around a thousand again don't call me and say how can I cheat to get a th000 reviews it's not the Thousand reviews that triggers it it's 1 reviews is a symptom of this game connecting with an audience okay so that's what we're looking at so this year 2024 I started going through my data because I make a big spreadsheet of all the 10,000 games and I just start looking at them okay now I've been doing this since 2022 every January since 2022 I've been looking at the games all of them but specifically taking an extra hard look at the Thousand review games okay 2022 there were 337 when I did this on January 3rd I do it like two days

after New Year's after January 1 just to make sure all the numbers have been compiled and stuff okay then in 2023 there were 354 and this year when I was going the numbers I was like there are a lot of games that have to go through here there were 445 that's a 25% increase than the previous year this is a pretty big jump up than the previous years and I was like something's happening here there are more games that are hitting these big numbers like $450,000 or more let's take a look okay so this is what I found this is the stuff now if you're smart at math you know your math like well Chris you told me the numbers have jumped up to 18,000 and the numbers have increased by 25% so what if you do the math really the number of games released this year versus last year increased about 31% but the number of thousand gains I'm just going to call thousand games from

here on out jumped 25% more so if you do the math it's not as good as I made it just sound okay because this is the number of percentage that succeeded so in 2022 2.7% of games got to that thousand 2.5 in 23 so 2.44 so steam this is my inter my interpretation of this data is valve knows that the influx is coming and they are just trying to open up the store and configure their filtering as best they can can to get as many of these 1,000 games as they can because they make money they want to make money too right that was helping but I don't know if it's fast enough okay it's it's close it's 2.5 versus 2.7 it's close but it's hard okay so here's why I think is helped in 2024 that allowed more games to come in okay uh one developers are just getting better at wish list you'll see a lot of post people like oh wish list are inflation you know it's too much wish list infl got inflation on the brain um I'll be

honest though wish list still matter you should still collect wish list and just because devs are better at getting wish list that still converts into more sales so there are more games getting more wish list more sales that's a good thing that's actually working okay two more people are knowing about daily deals um if you don't know about it daily deals once you reach certain thresholds my thought is around $150,000 $200,000 gross revenue pre- steam cut you can get a daily deal you call up Ste and you say hey steam I'd like a daily deal and they look at your numbers and they say let's see oh you do good numbers we're going to give you a daily deal um valve has opened up the system they've really made it easier to open up daily deals to to do it they introduced a tool where you can just pick your own date if you reach these kind of qualifying numbers um and more people know about I talk about it all the time like have you gotten your daily deal did you request your daily deal I tell people all the time about it so more people are knowing about it which means more sales now on the flip side I just wanted to make sure galarian was spelled correctly that's why I was kind of pausing there um valve has

opened it up it used to be there were only two slots on the front page of steam for a daily deal now there are four now if you do the math that means they've divided the number of game the eyes that come on Steam among four games instead of two and they've also been more restrictive you can only get two daily deals whereas before you used to be able to get like two or three so there are few there are more gains getting but there's less visibility per game so the devs that used to be able to rock a daily deal and get a lot of money nowadays are saying like well the daily deals just aren't as effective but more de are like yay I get a daily deal so that's the egalitarian nature like yeah if you want an expand visibility that means fewer devs are going to get those high dollar tickets but more people are getting them so hey talk to your friends all right so the final one uh valve has made the steam sales more profitable basically I've seen a lot of numbers like in the summer sale and the winter sale huge number increases for games that are on the upper end close to that thousand review or thereabouts they're

getting featuring like curated featuring I've seen a couple like pin things and I talked to a couple and they're like yeah valve just contacted us and we got to be on the front page of steam uh for these big sales and it was hugely profitable if you did that if valve contacted you say can we put you on the steam page on the front page of the Steam Sale contact me you know my contact information how to make Market agame.com contact me I want stories of this I've got a few Des but they were too little shy if you're not shy if you're brave and you did this some steam contact conted you valve contact you say can we put you on the front page of steam for the Steam Sale you know my number call me okay uh and then this fifth one new demo rules this kind of got implemented at the end of the year end of 2024 but steam has allowed you to notify wish listers when you launch a demo people are knowing more about demos like a separate store Page there's more visibility around demos and I think that's just increasing the sales so all of these things are combining to make it more potent and more game earning more money the

downside is there's more games so as a percentage of steam that but if you think about it it's like 100 more devs are basically able to have more income 100 more devs that's that's good that is a good thing that is good I like that you should like that too all right so one thing when I do uh this study when I look at the top you know seven so many games that get a thousand reviews or more I like like to look at the genre to see what genres are selling it's an important thing I built this chart just off of the 2024 games that reached a thousand reviews this chart only includes a th winners the Thousand review games and I look down at the genres okay here are all the genres that are included in this I know it's too small to see I might post down in the comments down below the list of these games but on the top is horror narrative shooter simulation owsc which is open world Survival Craft those are the top

genres on Steam now people are like oh the steam changes so much the genre that's hot this year is not hot next year that's why I do this folks I look at the top 1,000 games to see what's selling what are people actually buying and I graph them together and I made this very confusing hard to read chart which has lots of these I combined three years and I overlaid them and compared so this is horror for every all three years like one bar see these two bars are like overlapping that means the same number of of reviews hit the same number of games got a th reviews guess what this big bar is this year horror just blew the socks off the previous years you see that there are so many this is the first sign I was like look at how many horror games there are oh my god there are so many more thousand year review thousand review games this year what what's going on there are so many more games it's happening it's happening folks okay so there are a lot more games now let me take a look at this I want to tell you genres don't change as much as you think okay so here's the ranking of all genres per year look at this 2024

2023 2022 look at this horror was the number one genre for the games that earned a th not by total gross by just the number of games that have earned a thousand reviews steam loves horror games if you're not making a horror game you should everybody loves horror games but if you look all of these genres are very similar same genres over and over and again sometimes you see a new one pop in like vampire survivors peaked in 2023 not in 24 or 22 peaked in 23 idlers were really hot this year really hot CAU this year not as much of this but idler is still kind of down these charts not the top 10 but down there Let Me Tell You Folks these genres don't change as much everybody thinks genres change like like the wind they don't very consistent okay very consistent genres now whenever say something is a hit there's always like what about the survivorship bias anytime you talk about something succeeding you're like what about survivorship bias here it is I'm going to talk about it um so what I did and I know you can't read this chart I know you can't I'll link to it in blog my blog has this chart and you can zoom

in and stuff like this what I did was I looked at the the genre I looked at how many games got the Thousand then I looked at how many total were leased in 24 see not the survivorship bias all of it and then I looked at the percentage if I do that if I rank it by the percentage of all the games that succeeded it's still the those top 10 are pretty much there horror did drop a number of slots here's horror it did not earn as much as before you know and wasn't as popular because horror is there are a lot that are released every year but that's not a bad thing that's still really good so even if we look and account for the survivorship bias these genres are still tip toop now another thing that people always do is like well it's probably hobbyists uh you know 2D Platformers I'm sorry folks they just don't sell as well and whenever I bring that up people are like well it's because there's so many damn hobbyists clogging up the charts making so many so many dumb platformer games but the people who are real Developers for real

Platformers they're really doing well well I don't know I so what I did was I filtered out games that had under 700 followers that's public data and the number of followers which correlates closely to 7,000 wish lists which is what I consider serious developers people who can get 7,000 wish lists or people who can Market their game get their game out there it's looking good all that stuff so I filtered out anybody didn't get 7,000 in 2024 and the chart is almost exactly the same some of these games flip-flopped a little bit but Platformers are still way VR is way down here here's 2D platformer that's 2D platformer even when I filter out the hobbyists only what is it uh 2.5% of Platformers succeeded even when I filtered out the hobbyists the non- hobbyist serious developers only 2.5% of Platformers survivorship bias watch out I know about Celeste that's a survivorship it's it's really hard to sell Platformers folks I'm just I'm just

being honest I'm just being honest okay please don't please don't make me me don't say mean things down in the comments please okay all right so then uh let's look at another thing I looked at I always like to look at not literally look at the adult games but I like to see how they're doing because people always freak out when they see like pornography on the front page of the steam store they people are always like oh steam's turning into a porn shop too much porn on there I like to look at how many games are tagged as sexual content over the years look since 2019 guess what this year was a market low of sexual content on Steam it was it was one of the lowest years 88.7% of games were porn games and this could be even lower because sometimes people like to troll by tagging games as this so truly the number of games that are you know the naughty ones is actually down so don't forget folks steam's doing all right it's not too bad it's pretty consistent just around 10% on average 10% is porn that's that's the thing all right so with that let's take a look here yes there are more games than ever

18,000 but steam is mostly hobbyists 75% has zero chance of succeeding it's really the 25% that are competing against each other okay that's really what's true here and valve has implemented a number of features to help get those games that are decent somewhat to give them a little bit more fighting chance but I don't know if they're outrunning the number of games that's still that's Up For Debate you could debate in the comments I don't know um these are the games that I consider like decent genres that valve that steam players like to buy or basically these these are the ones that succeeded even when accounting for survivorship bias even counting for the failures these are kind of the top genres this is what people want on Steam horror is so awesome now I don't like to Deep dive on genre on YouTube because people are so mean and no matter what I say they get mad at me so I'm doing a secret private live Q&A I'm going to present even more data I'm going to go deeper into genre

show you deeper Trends um I sell this course called how marketing game.com um game marketing ideas is what it is if you go to here I'm doing a secret discount okay it's secret don't tell anybody and I'm going to do a deeper live analysis of genres the genres that sell and some of these things like Publishers where the Publishers are backing and all that kind of stuff I'm doing that deep dive um I'm going to do it on Monday the next Monday I don't know the date I'm always forgetting my dates check the comments um so if you sign up now I'm discounting this course uh down to 45 bucks because it's like the it's cheaper than a AAA game and you're going to learn about life you don't learn about life all the time from a AAA game um so it's a dawn Deep dive if you just use this link you got to use this link otherwise you don't get the coupon um that's what I'm going to do um so that's it uh that's steam in a nutshell um that's how you can do it's going to be live and you can question you can ask if I've accounted for survivorship bias I have a account for

survivorship bias um so uh do that don't subscribe to my YouTube channel who cares about YouTube YouTube sucks um you should be watching YouTube anyway anyway you got homework or you got to get back to work stop watching so much YouTube okay so don't subscribe to my YouTube channel I don't care this is the thing that's going to help you that's gonna be that so don't subscribe to my YouTube channel get out of here have fun enjoy your day all right thank you so much days of old for sign my dear poor [Music] old a cup of