this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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Showing just how insane it is to be a game developer right now, we've hit an all-time high for game releases on Steam in 2025 and not many get seen.

Taken from SteamDB, we can see from their data that there's been 19,008 games for 2025. That is a lot of games to be launching in a single year, which is up from 18,558 games in 2024 and 14,111 in 2023. This is a reminder that developers are not just competing with new releases when launching a game, but everything on Steam with many older titles remaining incredibly popular.

Showing just how difficult it can be to actually get a game in front of an audience, of the 19,008 from this year, a whopping 9,269 games have 10 or fewer reviews. There is a slight silver lining here though, as it appears the number of games receiving at least 100 reviews have been growing over the years since 2020. It's a bit lower than 2024 right now, but that will likely even-out before the end of 2025.

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[–] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I'm sure that these are gems, but they are not hidden; going by Steamdb, these games are all in the top 3% most popular games on Steam, based on the total number of reviews:

  • Toem: 9,500 reviews on Steam
  • Ghost of a Tale: 5,000 reviews on Steam
  • Lost in Random: 5,000 reviews on Steam
  • We Were Here: 31,000 reviews on Steam

Almost forgot: I don't think that I can name a truly hidden gem, but Deathbulge is pretty good and has a mere 360 reviews on Steam. Which is still more than the vast majority of indies, of course.