Nearly 19,000 video games were released on Steam in 2024. That’s a lot! In fact, it’s more than hit the platform in any other year. But most of those games, around 80 percent of them in fact, went mostly unplayed, according to publicly available data.
Before any of this will make sense, we first need to explain what a “Profile Features Limited” game, often referred to as simply a “limited game,” is on Steam. Well, years ago Valve implemented cool stuff like Steam achievements, game cards, and badges. These are great features that incentivize people to play and buy more games. However, not long after these features were added to Steam, some shady devs started creating very basic “games” that were just designed to pad achievements, give players cheap cards to trade, and increase their collection stats. So Valve came up with a solution to stop that stuff.
As explained by Valve via its Steam documentation website, games arrive on Steam “limited” and missing features like trading cards. Only games that meet a certain (undisclosed) popularity and sales threshold are able to escape this limited status. The idea is that this is a quality check against shovelware and scams. And if you’re curious how many games released on Steam in 2024 are limited, well, the answer is a lot.
Over on LinkedIn, Twitch’s head of games Bill Young posted an interesting breakdown of how the majority of video game releasing on Steam these days are limited. According to SteamDB, in 2024 18,992 games were released on Steam. But only 4,041 of those games racked up enough sales and attracted enough players to escape limited status. That means 14,951 games launched last year on Valve’s digital PC storefront were barely played or purchased.
That 14,951 works out to 79% of all games released on Steam in 2024. And this isn’t a new trend, as pointed out by Young. In 2020, 66 percent of all games launched on Steam were limited. In 2022, that number reached 72 percent. And now, it’s up to nearly 80 percent. If you’re curious about how 2025 is going to shake out, well, we’re only 13 days into the year and 444 games have already released on Steam. 389 of them are limited.
Some might argue that Valve shouldn’t throttle or limit any of these games. But the reality is that we would likely see an increase in shovelware, scams, and asset flips if Valve completely took down the barriers it currently has in place. And I don’t think the world needs 200,000 random games suddenly flooding Steam.
