Steam added 19,000 new games, breaking a record in 2024. However, 80% of these games were almost never played. The reason is the limited game system.
In 2024, Steam reached its highest number of games ever, with a total of 19,000 new games on the platform. However, only 4,041 of these games managed to gain enough popularity to leave the “restricted game” status. The remaining 14,951 games were almost never played or purchased. Valve uses the “restricted game” system to prevent low-quality games from filling the platform. This system requires new games to exceed a certain sales and player base threshold.
What is the Restricted Game System on Steam?
Valve offers features like achievements, game cards, and badges to incentivize gaming on Steam. However, over time, these features began to be used for low-quality games and fraudulent content called “shovelware”. To prevent this, Valve began keeping new games in “restricted” status initially.
Restricted games cannot access these features and can only bypass this status if they reach a certain number of sales or players. 79% of the games added to Steam in 2024 could not overcome these limitations and were almost never played by users. While this rate was 66% in 2020, it increased to 72% in 2022 and reached 80% in 2024.
Steam attracts attention with the increasing number of games every year. However, this increase makes it difficult to notice quality content. Although the 19,000 games released in 2024 offer great diversity, the number of games not played or purchased by users is quite high.
Although Valve’s quality control systems prevent low-quality content from flooding the platform, this can cause the projects of many independent game developers to go unnoticed. It is eagerly awaited how Steam will maintain this balance and how its future game publishing policies will be shaped.