The number of Steam releases remained relatively flat from 2018 to 2019

Newsbrief: While past years have shown a rise in the number of games hitting Steam, the jump from 2018 to 2019 was significantly less dramatic than years past.

According to data from third-party tracker SteamSpy spotted by Kotaku, 2019 yielded around 8,400 new releases on Steam, only a small increase from 2018’s 8,195 releases. Previous years often saw increases in the thousands--2017, for instance, saw 6,322 releases while 2016 yielded 4,400 new titles--making this latest addition a bit of an anomaly. 

That Kotaku writeup on the shift dives a bit deeper into why things look to have leveled out somewhat, and talks with SteamSpy founder (and current Epic Games Store publishing strategy director) Sergey Galyonkin to explore what factors might impact the data pulled from Steam. Though, as an added caveat, Niko Partners' Daniel Ahmad points out on Twitter that SteamSpy's data itself has been known to fluctuate as time goes on, which makes an exact read on Steam trends a bit more difficult to gauge.