Steam has one big problem with its smallest games

Perhaps the greatest advancement in game development in recent years is the ease of access for the average person to start making a game. This has lowered the barrier of entry to the point where creators of almost any skill level can get their games on a major platform; however, the platforms themselves have not adapted to accommodate the overwhelming amount of content added each day. It’s reached the point where the most prominent digital storefronts — PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam — are so saturated with new games on a daily basis that even great games can get buried and lost forever.

Excluding AAA games with massive PR and marketing budgets, every other game looking to get a shred of attention at launch is playing a rigged game of roulette with its success. We’ve hit a critical mass with the number of games coming out where the cream no longer rises to the top based on quality alone. As we approach an all-digital (or at least primarily digital) future, storefronts need to solve this discoverability problem sooner rather than later. It isn’t an issue of there being too many games, but the fact that the right games aren’t able to reach their target audience.

15 minutes of fame

When Braid was first released in 2008, there were only a total of 242 releases on Steam for that entire year. Fast forward to 2024 — which still has a quarter of the year left — and there have already been 10,862 game releases. That’s an average of almost 50 games per day thus far. Because storefronts like the PSN and Xbox have remained largely unchanged in the intervening years, Braid: Anniversary Edition was released and almost immediately pushed off the new releases pages.

With its primary means of exposure to the masses who don’t follow major gaming news cut off, this re-release of an established critical and commercial hit “has sold like dogs**t” according to creator Jonathan Blow. While we don’t know specific numbers across all platforms, Blow did remark that Steam was its biggest