Thousands of games in 2025 sold so poorly they didn’t even recoup the cost of being added to Steam

Launching a game on Steam remains a priority for many developers, but simply appearing on Valve’s storefront does not guarantee success.

According to research from Gamalytic, several thousand games released in 2025 sold so poorly that they didn’t even recoup the fee required to list them on Steam.

Polish indie developer Artur Smiarovski, creator of the Soulash series, drew attention to the data. The table shows roughly 13,000 titles launched on Steam since the start of the year, and only about 8% of those earned more than $100,000 — a reasonable threshold for commercial success.

Yet 40% of releases brought their creators less than $100 — the minimum needed to publish a game in Steam’s catalog. That suggests development costs for the majority of these projects were not recovered. Smiarovski argues that nearly half of 2025’s releases are games “no one needs,” and he advises new developers to first share their work on the free platform Itch.io before paying to list on Steam.

Gamalytic clarifies that the figures are estimates and may not be perfectly precise, especially for indie games where reliable sales data is difficult to obtain. Nevertheless, the researchers report a sample accuracy of about 99%.

Previously, Twitch’s head of gaming, Bill Young, noted that 79% of last year’s releases did not qualify for Steam features — including trading cards — because they attracted too few players.

Source: iXBT.games