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More Steam games launched so far in 2014 than in whole of 2013

by Mark Tyson on 19 May 2014, 14:00

Tags: Valve, PC

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A recent analysis by gaming magazine Gamasutra has found that Steam games launches are going erm... full steam ahead. The headlining fact the magazine discovered was that during the first 20 weeks of 2014 there were more Steam games launched than during the whole of 2013.

Valve's major PC games distribution and matchmaking service has really grown from strength to strength. However, with the significantly bigger influx of games on the market aiming at PCs connected to the Steam service, it will ultimately become harder for developers to get their games noticed – no matter how fantastic they might be.

So with many more games launches is it going to be harder to sort the wheat from the chaff, or even see any wheat there at all? GameSpot reports that Valve has been implementing community tools to help rank and chart games to get quality wares noticed; user reviews, tags and reports can be made about games available on the platform. Also the default front page store view has been changed to 'Top Sellers' rather than 'New Releases' (see above).

Gamasutra compiled a chart comparing this year so far with the two previous years, you can see it below. Another chart shows that there were almost 200 games launched on Steam last month compared with an average of under 50 per month from July 2012 to August 2013.

It is said that the launch of Steam Greenlight has spurred the amount of new games launching. The acceleration is expected to continue with Steam becoming more open; it is intended that any publisher will be able to use Steam as a store front in the future as it becomes closer to becoming a 'self-publishing platform'.



HEXUS Forums :: 18 Comments

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And yet the real figure is its all early access(demo) that never get sold unless you like wasting money on half built game and most never get updates and get pulled.

Steam has become a big spy joke these days and never listen to people they just want money.
How many of these ‘New Releases’ are actually ‘Early Access’ games though? could explain the much higher numbers, since early access was only launched in March 2013 and would have taken a couple of months to gather momentum with devs.
rubbish. there hasnt been hardly any decent games both consoles or PC's released in the last 6+months
j.o.s.h.1408;3279093
rubbish. there hasnt been hardly any decent games both consoles or PC's released in the last 6+months
Kingdom Rush for me - then again, it's only a tower defence game. Not exactly an AAA title. Your six-month timeline just misses out on BF4, which I'd argue was actually pretty decent on PC. Presumably TitanFall doesn't count either (not played it myself, and the hypegasm around me has me suspecting that it's ‘meh’). I'd also give a 5* to SRIV, but that's just me.

What I'd be interested in is if any fellow Hexiens have any tips for Greenlight's or Early Accesses that look worth a punt. There was that turn-based FPS that got covered here last week, and I'm toying with that prison simulator.
Its a shame most of the games are terrible burying decent games from view, I hope valve stop this idea of making everything open to the public to control