This article was originally posted on the Video Game Insights platform blog.
The last 2 years of the games market have been dominated by Covid. However, different types of games studios have seen contrasting effects. As a whole, the industry has seen a boom, but these gains haven’t impacted all games equally.
This report summarises PC games trends from 2017-21. It is using public data from Steam API as well as proprietary data gathered by Video Game Insights. Occasionally, references are made to other reports summarising 2021 games landscape.
2021 saw the most games ever to be released
There were 11.7k games released on Steam in 2021, beating the 2020 record of c. 10k. That means there are c. 30 games released on Steam every day.
Despite the large number of releases, the majority of games released on Steam are small – mostly hobby projects and shovelware (low quality games with very short development times).
27% of the games released in 2021 have only sold under 100 units. Only about 8% of the games released sold 10,000 units or more.
Over 95% of games on Steam are indie games and the proportion is increasing
There are only c. 200 AA or AAA games released on Steam every year. The rest are games released by independent studios – typically by small teams of 1-3 developers.
The proportion of independent games on Steam has increased over time. In 2021, 98% of games released on Steam were indie games.
The same trend is true when looking at self-publishing. The proportion of games on steam published by 3rd party publishing companies has consistently declined from 26.2% in 2017 to 24% in 2021.
However, this trend does not hold when filtering out the smallest games. When looking at only games that have sold over 500 units, the vast majority are published by a third party and that ratio has not changed.
The more successful games are still mostly published by third party publishers with appropriate skills and resources to support the developers.
Read the full games industry market report on Video Game Insights.
The gaming industry is growing, and that's wonderful! I have also noticed that the iGaming field is getting bigger, and I think that its pretty nice. I found a lot of nice video games about gambling and stuff like that, and I find them very interesting, for example “Casino World”, you can find more information if you're interested. I was surprised that this game has some new mechanics that I haven't seen in any other games.