2023 has quickly been inserted into the discussion for the year with the best selection of new game releases, with games like Baldur’s Gate 3, The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, and Alan Wake 2 headlining the year. For Steam users in particular, there’s a lot to consider, as reports say over 14,000 games launched on the service last year.
SteamDB, an independent site dedicated to analyzing Steam activity, states that 14,535 unique games launched on the platform in 2023, which marks a nearly 2,000-game increase from the previous year. VGC, via Circana (formerly NPD), also notes that Steam’s 14,000+ launch figure dwarfs the second-place platform–the Nintendo Switch, which saw 2,360 games added to its library.
The number of new releases on Steam is staggering when compared to a decade before; 2013 saw only 435 new Steam games for the entire year. It also nearly doubles the service’s output in 2018, when 8,900 games were launched.
In math terms: If you attempted to play every game that launched on Steam last year, you would have had to play video games every minute of every day of 2023. Oh, and you’d only be able to dedicate, at maximum, 37 minutes of playing time to each game.
2024 doesn’t seem to be slowing down either, as SteamDB reports nearly 100 games have already launched as of the writing of this sentence, with the number set to eclipse the century mark by the end of the day. Notable Steam launches in January 2024 include Tekken 8, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Enshrouded.
