(Image credit: Valve)

There are, as you may have noticed, a lot of videogames nowadays. We’re spoiled by the constant flow of game releases: It would be impossible for me to put any real amount of time into every PC game I was interested in, let alone every game that’s well reviewed or recommended by friends and critics I trust.

But while there are more than enough games for everyone, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re being played. According to SteamDB, more than 19,000 games have launched on Steam in 2025—but almost half of those new releases have been reviewed by fewer than 10 users.

(Image credit: SteamDB)

Of the 19,112 games represented in SteamDB’s data that released in 2025, 9,327 have fewer than 10 reviews. And of those, 2,229 haven’t been reviewed at all—meaning more than one in 10 games that launched this year have been left without any kind of user testimonial to inform potential customers.

Now, obviously, not every game is going to attract attention, and even fewer will attract *positive *attention. Speaking as someone who at time of writing has milled through almost 30,000 games in his Steam discovery queue, there’s a lot of junk being shoveled onto the platform.

But there are also plenty of games that are clearly being made with thought and attention that are getting swallowed in the competing noise. If you search on SteamDB specifically for games from this year with few reviews, you can find all kinds of fascinating oddities that seem criminally underappreciated: games where you can parkour at high speed as an armless priest in Hell, or do kickflips with fish.

Discoverability remains a massively daunting obstacle for all but the biggest launches on Steam: It’s why we see dozens of developers contributing to third-party sales in the name of getting a Steam genre tag so people can actually find their work. Steam has already implemented a host of curational features: user reviews, wishlisting, the discovery queue, curator pages, and more. Even if its discovery algorithms weren’t a famously impenetrable black box, ensuring games have a fair shot at finding customers is a complicated problem with an unclear solution—if there is one.

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Lincoln has been writing about games for 11 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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