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[Shambalakan]

About 9,000 games with no reviews or fewer than 10 reviews?!
If I were a developer, I'd just make 10 Steam accounts to buy my own game and jump ahead of those 9,000 titles!

And it only needed this one.

 

[L*][*N*K]

It's sad really. So much good titles remain unnoticed:

Why am I missing out on GOTY?

 

[Witchilich]

This is why Sony and Nintendo have quality control.

 

[March Climber]

This is why Sony and Nintendo have quality control.

Times have changed a bit.

 

[yurinka]

About 9,000 games with no reviews or fewer than 10 reviews?!

9000 'games'. Pretty 99.99% of them are asset flips or similar.

 

[Witchilich]

Times have changed a bit.

Sony still requires you to send early builds of games to SIE when you are developing the game for their console.

Sony Interactive Entertainment - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

SIE evaluates and approves games for its consoles. The process is stricter than for the Nintendo Seal of Quality, and developers submit game concepts to Sony early in the design process. Each SIE unit has its own evaluation process; SIEE, for example, approved Billy the Wizard for its consumers but SIEA did not. The company sometimes imposes additional restrictions, such as when it prohibited PS and PS2 games from being ported to the PSP without 30% of content being new to the Sony console.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Interactive_Entertainment#cite_note-kohler20080305-108"><span></span></a>

 

[yurinka]

https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

Of the games released in 2025, 2,113 received absolutely no player reviews. Another 6,595 games received only 1-9 single-digit reviews. Overall, nearly 48.7% (8,708 games) of games on Steam are in a state of near obscurity, receiving almost no player discussion.

There were only 1,092 games receiving 500+ user reviews in 2025, representing approximately 6.1% of all games released this year.

Under 2900 games had >100 reviews.

The other 15000 games were asset flips, garbage tier games or mediocre indie games with zero marketing who though somebody was going to buy their game just because it's on Steam and made a couple tweets about it.

As reference it takes around 2500 copies sold to get 100 reviews.

Sure but there are lots of great games that aren't super popular that are amazing. Usually by one or two people.

A few off the top of my head :
Gnomes.- tower defense style rogue like.

Tiny Rogues - twin stick indy rpg with 15+ character classes and unique runs and 1000s of weapons and items. Super fast paced action all gameplay. Game is great on PC or steam deck.

Gunlocked - auto scrolling ship combat /asteroids type rogue like shmup. Great on the deck.

Farthest Frontier - from the grim dawn devs. Medieval city builder with raider mechanic. Like banished but better

That's just a sampling. Ive found so many great gems that people on here would shit on because (reel graphics aren't cinematic or realistic or some shit).

None of these types of gems would come out of it was only AAA or AA type games. I do wish these were on the switch 1/2.

That being said we are lacking in some genres. Half life /undying era single player fps is still not being made. Same with heroes of might and magic strategy clones and no wizardry ultima style games either.

We do get deluged with hentai boob games and other click bait trash but there are good games that do get released by smaller studios.

This isn't just a steam thing. Eshop xbox and psn are flooded too

These ones look cool

 

[nemiroff]

Story good for console warriors. Nobody else gives a shit. Oh no, some single obscure game may be lost among the masses... Yeah, no shit sherlock, PC games don't have an expiration date, and it's not a walled garden. The platform has always been super-extensive, that's one of the reasons for why we love it.

 

[Crayon]

And it only needed this one.

I was just on that page for almost 5 minutes.

 

[lh032]

I thought steam is saving gaming, they ain't saving the devs it seems

 

[Impotaku]

Very much a quantity over quality situation. But that's also part of the appeal of pc gaming literally anyone can make a game and put it on steam. Just means it takes way more work to find the good in the sea of shit just like other platforms.

 

[xenosys]

4.4k reviews last year was enough to get you into the Steam Top 250 Most Reviewed Games of 2024 list.

14k got you into the top 100.

33k got you into the top 50.

Top 250 Most Reviewed Steam Games in 2024

Helping you find good games on Steam: impartial games rankings compiled from Steam gamer reviews.

web.archive.org

 

[Midn1ght]

Even 10 genuine user reviews for half of so many games is actually a miracle.

I released my game in 2018 and have a total of 52 reviews, rated Very Positive, but I still don't have an official score because only 8 of those reviews are from players who bought the game directly on Steam. lol
Now that the number of games released each year has more than doubled since 2018, it's wild to think about how an unknown single developer or a new small team can get noticed.

 

[Holammer]

Steam is a Darwinian forge from whence the next successful gameplay concepts and mechanics will emerge from.

 

[lughnasadh123]

Every year we're continuing to see the problem of just too many games out there.

 

[rm082e]

Hasn't been a problem for me. Steam puts plenty of tools for searching, sorting and filtering the shop to find what you're interested in. The slop games don't show up for me unless I go looking for them.

 

[Holammer]

Hasn't been a problem for me. Steam puts plenty of tools for searching, sorting and filtering the shop to find what you're interested in. The slop games don't show up for me unless I go looking for them.

Basically, the average user is not going to see 99,9% of the games unless they muck around.
Grab a shovel and get in there!

Steam Search

store.steampowered.com

 

[deeptech]

Steam store has slop, Sony better.

Anyways, lots of indie stuff goes on unnoticed sadly, but there's just too many coming out, you can't possibly check all of them without being glued to your screen all day.
This is why I prefer Sony, two to three games a year which I can luckily keep track of by visiting my favorite gaming websites.

 

[StereoVsn]

Yep I posted this in the last Steam gets too many games faux panic thread - there are roughly 3 million books published per year, and even if you just consider traditional publishers you are looking at the 500000+ range.

And the other issue with books vs games is that there is no good system to search for them. Amazon sucks for it and full of AI produced slop.

Games have it "easy" by comparison.

 

[StereoVsn]

Times have changed a bit.

Yeah, lol, go browse eShop and come back. Its discover features are non existent so all the slop is front and center.

 

[A.Romero]

Of course when there is a low entry threshold all kinds of shit will be released.

True innovation requires working on uncertainty and a low entry threshold. For many of those devs that migth be their first project and after releasing it many leasons were learned. Maybe they will keep trying, maybe they will take their experience into a company.

Others, of course, are scammers but there is no way to know without someone being the gatekeeper and that was the situation in the industry for a long time. Luckily that's not the case anymore. }This just means that, as consumers, we need to dig harder to find gold but the trade off is that many good things that otherwise wouldn't have seen the light of day were released and will continue releasing.

Complaining about lack of innovation and that a lot of shit gets to be released at the same time doesn't make sense.

 

[StereoVsn]

Basically, the average user is not going to see 99,9% of the games unless they muck around.
Grab a shovel and get in there!

Steam Search

store.steampowered.com

Yep, I never see this crap and Steam does recommend actually interesting indies all the time.

Of course when there is a low entry threshold all kinds of shit will be released.

True innovation requires working on uncertainty and a low entry threshold. For many of those devs that migth be their first project and after releasing it many leasons were learned. Maybe they will keep trying, maybe they will take their experience into a company.

Others, of course, are scammers but there is no way to know without someone being the gatekeeper and that was the situation in the industry for a long time. Luckily that's not the case anymore. }This just means that, as consumers, we need to dig harder to find gold but the trade off is that many good things that otherwise wouldn't have seen the light of day were released and will continue releasing.

Complaining about lack of innovation and that a lot of shit gets to be released at the same time doesn't make sense.

Exactly this. Remember when Steam had Greenlight and everyone complained that they were gatekeeping. And before that when they had curated system even more complained.

So now same people are complaining that Steam basically democratized ability from people all over the world to publish games.

The issue isn't 15,000-16,000 games that don't matter, there is still overwhelming amount of decent to good to great games being produced.

Again, over 1,000 games received over 500 reviews. It just shows how successful Steam has become at allowing devs to have a platform to publish.