A new record for the most Steam releases in a year sounds impressive, but it’s really a dismal statistic that highlights how doomed most indie games are.
On one hand, 2025 has been a cracking year for the indie game scene, with the likes of Ball X Pit, Blue Prince, and Look Outside all cultivating their own audiences and gaining a degree of prominence.
That’s not even getting into Hollow Knight: Silksong finally releasing and, of course, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 becoming the industry’s new golden child and sweeping The Game Awards 2025.
However, these are the exceptions to the rule and things have only become harder for small development teams, as evidenced by just how many video games launched on Steam this year alone.
How many new Steam games released in 2025?
According to data compiled by SteamDB, the number of Steam releases has consistently been climbing almost every year. There was an especially sizable leap last year (over 18,556 new games compared to 14,107 in 2023) and 2025 has surpassed that record with 19,468 games.
That’s an obscene number and we doubt even the most ardent of PC gamers will have heard of most of these new releases, let alone played any of them.
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SteamDB’s data also shows that more than half of these games have received 10 or less user reviews, with 2,281 of them not getting any reviews at all.
On top of that, like PlayStation, Steam has its own annual recap you can check out if you have an account. But aside from providing your own stats, it also reveals that Steam owners only played an average of four games this year. And how many of those do you reckon were even new releases and not ongoing free-to-play favourites?
Some of the lesser known games are bound to be shovelware, that genuinely aren’t worth the attention, but others will have been sincere attempts to make a great game, that nobody ever notices.
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Indie games have increasingly become a more affordable alternative to big budget AAA releases. This generation began with the likes of Sony pushing for £70 games and there’s every chance they could go up to £80, especially with Nintendo now willing to charge upwards of £75 for certain first party releases like Mario Kart World.
Being cheaper, however, is not a sure fire way to success. Not only do indie devs have to compete with the bigger publishers, but also the more famous indie studios that can rely on name recognition. And, as was seen with Hollow Knight: Silksong, don’t care about helping out their fellow indie studios any more than a triple-A publisher would.
When smaller titles like Balatro break through the cracks it’s always an awkward mixture of deserved success and blind luck.
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