38% Of Steam’s Entire Catalog Was Added In 2016

The fact that people crave a Half-Life 3 isn’t something Valve is oblivious to, but if we need reasons as to why the company has yet to give us that, look no further than it other games, and Steam. Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 are enormously popular, and have proven to be cash cows for the company. It’s no surprise, then, why the company has seemingly put other series on the back-burner.

Looking at Steam’s homepage fuels that reason even further: it’s almost difficult to keep up with the number of releases. If you merely skip a day of looking at Steam’s front page, you’re bound to miss a couple of releases. That’s a stark contrast to a couple of years ago, and the situation will only get worse as the number of titles to hit the service still continues to accelerate.

According to Steam Spy, a service that monitors all things Steam stats, a staggering 38% of Steam’s entire game catalog was released in 2016. 38%… in a single year, for a service that has been around for thirteen.

38% of all Steam games were released in 2016 pic.twitter.com/JiX2pt6JhB

— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) November 30, 2016

If this momentum keeps up, and there’s no doubt that it will, it means that Steam could increase its catalog 100% between 2015 and 2018. In fact, it could even happen quicker if we look at all content, not just gaming content. With VR content increasing in popularity, that will help, too.

This growth begs an obvious question: is it a good thing? The reason for this growth is thanks to the indie market, and there’s no denying that within that market, there are many great titles. But for Steam fans, the absolute insurgence of indie titles has also brought some bad. Today, it feels like someone could slap together a game in a day and pawn it off as a legitimate title.

As of the time of writing, Steam sells a total of 12,055 games, and of those, 8,148 fall into the “indie” category. That’s a mammoth share, and it takes the mystery out of why Steam is growing at such an incredible rate. But it’s happening at the expense of more “shovelware” hitting the service, as some like to call it, which begs another question: what’s the point of Steam Greenlight? It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Greenlight should just be shut down, because it doesn’t serve as much of a purpose as it once did (especially not considering what makes it to the front page anyway.)

What do you guys think? Is Steam fine as it is today? Or would you rather it go back to how it was five-years-ago? Clearly, that’s not going to happen, but it’s fun to dream.