Submitted 10 months ago by Carighan@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/a-record-14000-games-were-released-on-steam-in-2023/
To me, the interesting bit here is less about Steam in particular, but about the industry overall.
Fourteenthousand games. That’s insane. Sure, the vast majority is going to be asset flips and shovelware crap, probably a lot of AI generated spam games in there, too. But the sheer amount is still staggering. That’s a fair few games compared to when I started gaming in 1987, playing Squirm on a C16 with a tape drive.
the biggest concern for me is that game stores are going to become increasingly algorithmic to deal with this problem. Then game development becomes more about pleasing the algorithm than it does about pleasing the customer, or about making something good.
you can see this play out pretty much anywhere algorithms decide what people can see, YouTube is a good example, many channels had to just change to adapt to what the algorithm wants rather than what their audience wanted.
And of course this leads to situations where you can make something brilliant but no one will ever know, because algorithm.
For a better scale that’s 1 new game every 38 minutes.
I’m hoping that it will eventually lead to a video game crash like in the late twentieth century
the way i try to make sense of it is imagine if every commercial movie was released on the same platform. when i say every movie i mean every movie. every movie from film school thesis that got a limited screening in the local cinema to hollywood blockbusters, from every country of the world, USA, china, india, nigeria, etc… all released on the same platform. i’d bet it would probably have the same amount or even more movies than steam has games. valve just has that kind of global monopoly on the PC gaming space. we only tend to see the shovelware since they are predominantly made to swindle cash out of highest value customers which are english speaking people either in anglosphere or in parts of europe that english literacy is high. we never get to see countless good or bad chinese games because… well they are in chinese.
don’t get me wrong steam is filled with crap and scams but it’s because everything is filled with crap and scams. although actual moderation from valve would be welcome. it’s a hard problem but they got the money and no excuse.
I believe that’s more games than any one gaming console has had released in its entire life. Not counting digital-only games from modern consoles with Steam-like stores, of course…
It is, by a significant amount. The switch has the most at over 4k, a bit more than the PS2 (which also had over 4k releases). The PS2 stat is pretty impressive though, cos they were all physical releases.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
And 13,500 of them were Hentai puzzle games
Carighan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I doubt it, because that’d still be in the top 1% for shovelware quality. 😅