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Steam has just quietly cruised past a big landmark. There are now more than 30,000 games on the Steam store in total, a number that’s been ballooning skywards in the last couple of years as the arguments for and against curation still rage.

Incredibly, the number of games on Steam more than doubled in the last two years alone. At the end of 2016 there were, and this word feels wrong in its use here, just 14,000 games. In 2017 and 2018 alone, 16,312 games were released. That’s 22.3 games per day, every day of the year, for two years straight. That’s 8,156 games per year. If the average game is 10 hours long, it would take 9.31 years of solid playing to beat a single year’s worth of Steam releases.

According to Steam, there is now a grand total of 30,040 games on the service. Steam Spy suggests that this figure is only accelerating, despite competition from other platforms such as the Epic Games Launcher, Discord, Twitch, GOG, Origin, Uplay, Battle.net and more.

If we ignore the first decade on Steam’s existence, where the number of annual game releases was a much more reasonable 100-300 per year, the data below shows how the popularity of the Steam store is growing exponentially.

Number of Games Released on Steam Per Year

2013 – 535 2014 – 1310 2015 – 2504 2016 – 4623 2017 – 6983 2018 – 9329

The big question now is, where does it end? At the current rate of growth, the number of games on Steam is doubling every 18-24 months, a number that’s surely unsustainable. The sheer number of failed games must be stratospheric at this point, either due to a lack of discoverability or being one of the thousands of hastily thrown together filler games that can litter the store.

Do you think the huge number of games releasing spells trouble for Steam? Or has Steam never been in better health? Let us know what you think below!