80% of Games Released on Steam in 2024 Have Not Been Played
In 2024, Steam reached its highest number of games ever, with a total of 19,000 new games on the platform. However, only 4,041 of these games gained enough popularity to be removed from “restricted” status. The remaining 14,951 games were barely played or purchased. Valve uses a “restricted game” system to prevent low-quality games from crowding the platform. This system requires new games to meet a certain threshold of sales and player base.
What is the Restricted Game System on Steam?
Valve offers features such as achievements, game cards, and badges to encourage games on Steam. However, over time, these features began to be used for low-quality games and fraudulent content called “shovelware”. To prevent this, Valve started keeping new games in “restricted” status at first.
Restricted games cannot access these features and can only overcome this situation when they reach a certain sales or player count. 79% of the games added to Steam in 2024 could not overcome these restrictions and were hardly played by users. This rate increased from 66% in 2020 to 72% in 2022 and reached 80% in 2024.
Steam attracts attention with the increasing number of games every year. However, this increase makes it difficult to notice quality content. Although the 19,000 games released in 2024 offer a great variety, the number of games that are not played or purchased by users is quite high.
Although Valve’s quality control systems prevent low-quality content from filling the platform, this situation can cause many independent game developers’ projects to go unnoticed. It is curious to see how Steam will maintain this balance and how its future game publishing policies will shape.
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