Data Report

Thirty years of games on Steam

By Jack Welborn

This report analyzes — games published on Steam between —, drawn from the Steam store's own catalog data. It looks at how fast the catalog has grown, which genres and publishers dominate it, how players rate and play what they buy, and how ownership of the platform's audience is distributed. The short version: growth has been explosive, a small number of genres and blockbuster titles account for a disproportionate share of everything measurable, and cross-platform support has quietly declined even as the catalog exploded.

— Games analyzed
—–— Years covered
— Distinct publishers
— Catalog-wide review-positive rate

Every year's biggest releases

Pick a year to see the five most-owned games that debuted on Steam that year. Each node's size shows how many games shipped in total. Dates are Steam listing dates, so older titles appear in the year they reached Steam, which can be later than their original launch. The most recent year is still in progress, and its owner estimates haven't settled yet.

The catalog has grown roughly ninefold since 2015

Steam published about — games in 2015. By 2025 that had grown to — — a release rate that keeps climbing every year, with no sign of slowing. Most of Steam's entire catalog, in other words, is recent: more games were released in 2024 and 2025 combined than in the platform's first fifteen years put together.

Fig. 01

Three genres make up more than three-quarters of the catalog

Of 27 distinct genres in the data, Action, Adventure, and Casual alone account for — of every game published. Action is the single largest genre at — games, roughly double the next largest.

Fig. 02

Free-to-play grew for a decade, then plateaued

The free-to-play share of new releases rose from about — in 2010 to a peak of roughly — in —, then eased back down to — in 2025. Across the whole catalog, — of games are free.

Fig. 03

Review positivity is high everywhere, but genres still separate

Weighted across every review on the platform, — of reviews are positive. Among the ten largest genres, Indie and Casual games rate highest; Simulation games rate lowest, at roughly ten points below the Indie/Casual rate.

Fig. 04

RPGs hold players far longer than any other major genre

Among games that report any playtime at all, the median RPG holds a player for about — minutes — more than double the median for Action or Casual games, and about five times the median for Free To Play titles.

Fig. 05

Mac and Linux support has fallen as the catalog has grown

Mac support peaked in 2013, when roughly — of that year's releases supported it; by 2025 that had fallen to about —. Linux support followed the same arc, from a similar peak down to roughly — in 2025 — even as the total number of games shipped each year kept climbing.

Fig. 06

The publishers who ship the most games aren't the ones who own the players

63,000-plus publishers have released a game on Steam, but ownership of the audience is concentrated at the very top: the ten largest publishers by estimated owners — Valve, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Activision, KRAFTON, 2K, Bethesda, SEGA, Rockstar, and Capcom — account for roughly — of estimated owners across the entire 117,000-game catalog. None of them are among the most prolific publishers by game count; the publishers who release the most titles are small studios pushing out large volumes of budget games.

Fig. 07

Ownership follows an extreme long tail

The top 1% of games by estimated owners — about 1,170 titles — account for roughly — of all estimated ownership across the catalog. The top 10% account for about —. The remaining 90% of games, tens of thousands of titles, split the last eighth of the audience between them.

Fig. 08

Cross-platform support is still the exception, not the rule

— of every game in the catalog targets Windows and nothing else. Among the games that do reach beyond it, full support for both Mac and Linux (— of the catalog) is actually slightly more common than Mac support without Linux (—) — developers who leave Windows-only mostly commit to the full spread rather than picking just one extra platform.

Fig. 09

About this data

The data comes from the Steam Games Dataset maintained by Fronkon Games (MIT license), which is built directly from the official Steam store API and SteamSpy. One row is one published game on Steam: its release date, its developer and publisher, its genre and store category, which platforms it runs on, its price, its review counts, and Steam's own estimate of how many people own it. DLC, soundtracks, videos, and other non-game listings are already excluded by the source dataset.

From the source file's — usable rows, this analysis drops — rows: — pre-release "playtest" builds (not released games), — games with no genre listed at all (genre is used throughout this site as a filter and category), and one row with no game name. That leaves — games. The raw source file also had a header bug — a missing comma merged its "Discount" and "DLC count" columns into one — which the cleaning script corrects before anything else.

Every derived number on this site is computed the same way:

Want to slice the data yourself instead of reading someone else's summary of it? Head to the dashboard.