Steam Spy creator Sergey Galyonkin shared an intriguing graph on Twitter today that suggests more games were released on Steam in 2016 than any other year in the history of the platform.
It’s not surprising that the number of games released on Steam would climb steadily as barriers to developing a game and launching it on Steam fall away, but the discrepancy between volume of Steam releases year-over-year is notable: According to Galyonkin’s analysis, roughly 38 percent of all the games on Steam were released this year. ~26 percent were released last year, and ~16 percent were released on Steam in 2014.
If those numbers are on point, that means roughly 80 percent of all the games on Steam came out in the past 3 years — and the trend shows no signs of stopping.
It’s also important to keep in mind that Galyonkin’s Steam Spy tracker is imperfect, and the data it provides should be taken with a grain of salt. While platform’s avowed margin of error for measuring how many Steam accounts own a given game doesn’t really factor into this release date analysis, devs should keep in mind that “games released on Steam in 2016” includes old games coming to Steam for the first time.
Of course, it does not include DLC, non-game software, and games without owner data (according to Galyonkin), which means that the actual volume of stuff released on Steam this year may account for even more than 38 percent of everything on the platform.