How many games are available on Steam?
About 120,000 games as of late 2025 — but that number is wrong by the time you finish reading it. Steam adds roughly 55 new games a day, so the honest answer is a moving target, not a fixed total.
Drag the year. Watch the catalogue explode.
Every stop is a real SteamDB figure. The story isn't any single number — it's the shape of the curve.
Highest annual total ever — roughly 55 new games a day.
The honest answer
SteamDB, the tracker the whole industry leans on, put the cumulative count at 120,882 games released on the platform by the end of 2025. That is the figure to quote when someone asks “how many games are on Steam.” It is the one number with a clean, public source behind it.
The catch is that “games” is only part of what lives in Steam's database. The platform's app list also holds DLC, demos, soundtracks, videos, series and software, each with its own store page. Years ago, when developers compared Steam's two public APIs, the full app list returned roughly 108,000 entries while the games-only query returned about 49,000 — more than twice as many things as actual games. The ratio has held as both have grown, which is why “everything on Steam” is a far bigger, far blurrier number than the games count.
A number that's always wrong
Rewind to 2007 and Steam released 135 games the entire year — Valve personally approved nearly all of them. In 2015 it was 2,822. In 2024 it was 18,477, and 2025 broke past 20,000 for the first time. Put plainly: Steam now releases more games in a single year than existed in its whole catalogue before 2016.
That is why a fixed answer is misleading. By the time a “there are X games on Steam” article is published, another few hundred have shipped. The slider above isn't decoration — the steepness of that curve is the answer to the question.
What opened the floodgates
Two policy changes did almost all of this. Steam Greenlight arrived in 2012 and let the community vote games onto the store, ending Valve's era of hand-picking. Then in June 2017, Steam Direct scrapped the vote entirely: any developer could publish by paying a flat, recoupable $100 fee per title. The barrier to a global storefront dropped to the price of a video game.
Analyst Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo sums up the surge as the “democratisation of game creation” — cheaper tools, free engines, and a one-click path to the world's biggest PC store. Tellingly, in Steam's entire history only one year has ever seen fewer releases than the year before: 2018. Every other year, the firehose opened wider.
The Steam graveyard
A bigger catalogue is not the same as a bigger library you'll ever touch. Of the 19,112 games SteamDB tracked for 2025, 9,327 — almost exactly half — had fewer than ten user reviews, and 2,229 had no reviews at all. More than one in ten games released that year reached the public without a single person leaving a verdict.
This is the quiet truth behind the headline number. The count keeps climbing, but visibility is the scarce resource. For Valve the maths still works — every $100 fee is revenue whether the game finds an audience or not — which is part of why nothing about the system pushes the release rate back down.
What even counts as a game?
“120,000” is the games-only figure. Start folding in everything else with a store page and the number swells fast. Toggle the categories below to see how much the answer depends on where you draw the line.
What even counts as a “game” on Steam?
Tick what you'd include. Only the games row is a hard SteamDB figure; the rest are labelled estimates of the non-game entries in Steam's app database.
How many are free, horror, multiplayer, VR…?
“120,000 games” flattens an enormous amount of variety. Once you slice the catalogue by Steam's own tags, the picture gets concrete: about 27,997 free-to-play games, 24,169 horror games, 28,794 multiplayer games, 21,920 in Early Access, and about 10,120 VR titles, per SteamDB's tag index.
One caveat that trips people up: tags overlap. A single game can be tagged indie, co-op and horror, so the numbers below don't partition the catalogue — each is simply “how many games carry this tag.” That's also why “indie” (133,274) reads higher than the total game count: almost everything self-published wears it.
How many games of each kind?
SteamDB's tag counts, current. Tags overlap — one game can be indie, co-op and horror at once — so these don't add up to the catalogue. Tap a bar to see it on its own.
What “available” actually means
One more wrinkle: available is not the same as released. Games get delisted when licences lapse — think soundtracks pulled over music rights, or titles yanked after a studio closes — so they vanish from the store while still sitting in your library if you bought them. Others are region-locked, in paid Early Access rather than full release, or live only as a demo.
So the precise answer to “how many games can I buy on Steam right now?” is slightly smaller than the all-time released count, and it changes daily in both directions. The clean, defensible number to carry away is still the one at the top: ~120,000 games and climbing by roughly 55 a day.
Is more games actually more games?
The interesting thing about the curve isn't that it goes up — it's that the things people actually played in the last couple of years came out of the noise, not in spite of it. Balatro, a one-developer card-and-poker game from a creator who goes by LocalThunk, became one of 2024's defining hits. Vampire Survivors started as a cheap experiment and spawned a whole genre. Palworld sold millions in its first days of Early Access in January 2024. None of those would have existed under the old hand-picked store.
But the same open door that let them in is why roughly half of last year's releases were reviewed by fewer than ten people. The platform didn't get more generous to players; it got more generous to developers, and shifted the hard problem from “can I publish?” to “will anyone ever find it?”
So the real question behind “how many games are on Steam” isn't a number at all. It's whether a catalogue can keep doubling without burying the next Balatro before anyone clicks it.
Do you really know the firehose?
Roughly how many games launched on Steam in 2025?
Sources
- SteamDB — Steam game releases by year. Per-year and cumulative game counts (2007: 135; 2024: 18,477 / cumulative 100,879; 2025: ~20,003 / cumulative 120,882). Snapshot late 2025.
- SteamDB — Steam game tags. Per-tag game counts used in the breakdown (Free to Play: 27,997; Horror: 24,169; Multiplayer: 28,794; Early Access: 21,920; VR: 10,120; Indie: 133,274). Tags overlap, so counts don't sum to the catalogue.
- PC Gamer, December 2025. 19,112 games released in 2025; 9,327 with fewer than 10 reviews; 2,229 with none.
- This Week in Videogames / GameDiscoverCo, December 2025. Year-on-year release totals (2015: 2,822; 2020: 9,654) and Simon Carless on the “democratisation of game creation”; 2018 as the only down year.
- Steam Web API store snapshots (woctezuma, GitHub). The games-vs-apps gap: the full app list (~108k, Jan 2021) returns games, DLC, software, hardware, videos and series; the games-only query returned ~49k. Non-game category sizes in the toggler are estimates derived from this gap.
Keep counting
The only honest answer to “how many games are on Steam” is a question right back: how many have shipped since you started reading?