How the pandemic affected game releases on Steam

The VG Insights service released an infographic in which it highlighted in detail how the pandemic affected Steam in terms of launching new projects. According to his data, the unfavorable situation in the world last year had a significant impact on all types of gaming products (that is, both AAA projects and games from indie teams).

In total, the service specialists noted four main consequences.

1. The total number of game releases has increased significantly
In 2020, the number of releases for the first time in the history of Steam exceeded the mark of 10 thousand.

This is almost a quarter more than a year earlier. Plus, we note that before that there was a trend for a decrease in the number of annual releases.

Steam Releases (2018 – 2020)2. Reduction of launches from large teams

The restructuring of the business for remote work required a lot of time from large studios and, as a result, significantly affected their plans. Many were forced to postpone releases. This significantly affected the number of AAA and AA games that appeared on Steam in 2020. They turned out to be 13.7% less than a year earlier.

AAA, AA and indie releases on Steam (2018 – 2020)3. Increased releases from indie teams

At the same time, small independent teams showed high flexibility against the background of COVID19. Apparently, their employees had more free time, which they were just able to direct into the working channel. It is difficult for others to explain the growth of indie releases, which was observed all last year.

Important: as a result of the 1st quarter of 2021, the situation with such projects has not changed much. Yes, the number of releases relative to the 4th quarter of 2020 has fallen slightly, but it still remains at a very high level.

Dynamics of Steam releases (2018 – 2021)

4. The average cost of games has increased (including for indie projects)

Last year, the share of games whose cost is $20-40 increased to 17.2%. By almost two percentage points. At the same time, the share of games with small price tags of $1-5 decreased by two and a half percentage points. As noted in VG Insights, this shows that despite the growth of competition in the indie segment, prices for such products are growing.

Price dynamics on Steam (2018-2020)
VG Insights is a young service that uses third—party APIs to collect data.

Including the Steam API itself, as well as the IGDB API.