Flood of new Steam games following Direct introduction

Steam has launched over 1000 new games since the introduction of Steam Direct seven weeks ago.

Since the launch of Steam Direct, there has been a spike in the number of games released on the Valve marketplace. 730 games were released in the last four weeks and 213 games released in the last week alone.

These figures come from Ico Partners' Thomas Bidaux, who tweeted a graph showing the number of games released per week on Steam since 17th April. The chart marks the introduction of Steam Direct and Steam Summer Sales.

From the chart we can see there has been a gradual increase in the number of games released per week on Steam, from the week commencing 17th July.

In a follow-up tweet, Bidaux put these figures into perspective by comparing them to last year's figures.

Steam Direct was introduced as a replacement for Steam's crowd-voting platform Greenlight, which came to an end on 13th June after nearly five years. Steam Direct lets developers list their game on the Valve marketplace as long as they pay the $100 fee per title. The fee is refunded if the title reaches over $1000 in sales.

When Steam Direct went live, Valve published a blog post which stated it expected "an initial surge of new submissions", before evening out at "a new rate somewhat higher than what was coming through Greenlight".

It'll be interesting to see how Steam Direct impacts the number of games that come out on the platform, but most users will be more concerned with the quality of the titles that make it through. Steam has for some time now suffered from a plethora of poor-quality games, some of which have been accused of ripping off assets.

However, in the Steam Direct blog post, Valve promised it would "be keeping an eye on new submissions and making adjustments as necessary". Hopefully this will prevent a lot of tripe getting through.