There Are How Many Games On Steam?

There more than 6,000 games currently available on Steam. If it seems like there's a flood of new games on the digital distribution outlet pumped out each and every day that's because new and old developers and publishers are putting up titles all the time.

According to Gamespot the 6,000 figure is up from the 3,700 titles that were on the platform just a year ago. The latest figure also doesn't include the games that have been delisted from Steam.

The number is rising at a rapid rate thanks to new community services like Steam Greenlight, where independent developers can now interact directly with the gaming community instead of having to go through Valve and get vetted through their team. With Greenlight a developer can pay $100 and list up as many games as they want. At that juncture it's up to the community to vote for and favorite a game to move it through the Greenlight process. After receiving enough votes Valve will give the game a thumbs up and enable it for eligibility for distribution through the Steam storefront.

Take note that Greenlight is not a perfect service function and there are a lot of complaints about how the system can be gamed with joke titles or rip-offs. However, a lot of it falls on how well the trailer and screenshots win over gamers who click in and check the title out.

Some developers complain that the Greenlight service doesn't properly allow for their games to shine or gain traction, while others praise the service because the alternative was Valve manually vetting each game. Of course, Valve likes some games and doesn't like others. Games like McPixel were rejected multiple times before under Valve's old method but was quickly approved under the Greenlight feature. Hence, tons more games have been allowed to appear on Steam after gamers were able to vote for what they wanted on the service.

New complaints have arisen stating that the deluge of new titles and the quickly expanding library of Steam's storefront has dampened the quality of the service, but as noted in Gamespot article the new Discovery features were implemented specifically to address the library issue. Gamers can now filter through games so that they only see what's important to them or are notified about titles based on games already in their library.

Of course, yet another problem popped up insofar that a lot of games are no longer visible to some gamers if it doesn't generally fit into the genre of games that make up for most of their library, so it's easy for hidden gems to slip through the cracks. This has led to complaints that there are now too many games being allowed on Steam.

The reality is that there's no such thing as a perfect system and more is always better than less. I mean, if we were using a movie service analogy as a comparison, I tend to doubt that Netflix subscribers would complain that there are too many movies and shows on the service.

Valve's solution for having thousands of new games added to their system on a regular basis seems to be to improve the filtration process and to make it easier and more efficient for users to find the kind of games that they want to play. It appears to be working for now.