In 2013, 436 games were released on Steam. Last year, that number was more than 21,000.
The platform that once felt like a curated destination for PC games now sees an average of 58 new titles everyday. And the sales results and player engagement data are not comforting for most of these titles. According to analysis from Gamalytic, the median revenue for a Steam game in 2025 was $249. Not $249,000. $249. 66% of games released that year never even earned back the $100 Steam Direct fee, since Valve only credits that fee against your first $1,000 in revenue, and most games never get there. 47.5% sold fewer than 100 copies.
The market for games has never been bigger. The market for your game has never been harder to crack.
This is the challenge every publisher is navigating right now, from a two-person indie studio to a mid-size label shipping a dozen titles a year.
The Numbers Behind the Problem
To understand where game marketing needs to go, it helps to understand how we got here.
Steam began hosting third-party games in 2005, but for years access stayed tightly curated by Valve. The floodgates opened gradually, then all at once, starting with Steam Greenlight's move to community-voted approval in 2012. The introduction of Steam Direct in 2017 replaced the community-voted Greenlight system with a flat $100 submission fee and removed the last significant barrier to publishing. The result was a near-vertical growth curve: 8,865 games were released in 2018, climbing to 11,220 in 2021, then 14,032 in 2023, and 18,482 in 2024. By 2025, yearly releases had more than doubled since 2020, hitting 21,362 titles.
That is more games released in a single year than the entire Steam catalog contained as recently as 2014.
The platform itself kept growing. Steam reached 147 million monthly active users in Q1 2025 and generated over $16.2 billion in game sales through November of that year. By almost every headline metric, Steam looks healthy. But those headlines mask a structural problem: only 15% of total Steam playtime in 2024 went to games released that year. Titles between one and seven years old took 47%, and games eight or more years old captured 37%.
Players are not exploring. They are returning to games they already know, or being steered toward titles that already have momentum. And for the vast majority of new releases, almost half of all games released in 2025 received fewer than 10 user reviews, with around 2,200 titles receiving no reviews at all.
A game can launch on the world's largest gaming platform and effectively not exist.
Why Waiting to Be Discovered No Longer Works
The conventional wisdom used to be that a good game would find its audience eventually. Word of mouth would kick in. Steam's algorithm would pick it up. A streamer would stumble across it.
That world is gone. Global mobile gaming user acquisition spend alone reached approximately $25 billion in 2025, which shows how much of the market depends on buying visibility rather than earning it. The studios with the largest marketing budgets are not spending that money because they are insecure about their games. They are spending it because they understand what the data shows: in a market this crowded, attention is not a byproduct of quality. It has to be built deliberately, and early.
According to GameDiscoverCo's breakdown of the 2024 Steam market, the 1,000th-ranked new game of the year made $118,000 before refunds, VAT, and Steam's platform fee, and that ranking represents the top 5% of all releases by revenue. The 2,500th-ranked game, still placing it in the top 13% of all titles that year, grossed approximately $11,000. The other 87% made less.
Discovery is not failing for bad games. It is failing for games that did not invest in getting found.
The Biggest Mistake Publishers Make: Treating Gamers as One Audience
Most game marketing campaigns share a common flaw. They try to reach "gamers."
It sounds logical. Find the people who play games and put your game in front of them. But "gamers" is not an audience. It is a population of hundreds of millions of people with radically different tastes, habits, platform preferences, and reasons for playing.
The 58-year-old who plays Farming Simulator for three hours every Sunday is a gamer. So is the 22-year-old queueing for competitive Counter-Strike at 2am. The 35-year-old who only plays JRPGs and has 400 hours in Persona. The 17-year-old who discovered gaming through Roblox and has never touched a PC title. These people do not want the same thing, do not respond to the same messaging, and do not live in the same corners of the internet.
A cozy farming sim placed in front of an esports audience will not convert. An anime JRPG will not resonate with the Madden player. A hardcore survival roguelike will be ignored by someone who plays two hours a week on their phone. Reaching the wrong audience is not just wasteful. It actively trains the platform algorithms that your game does not connect with people, making the next attempt harder.
Publishers who succeed at launch know their specific player before they spend their first dollar. Not "gamers." The exact subset of gamers their game was built for.
What Effective Game Launch Marketing Actually Looks Like
The publishers who break through in this environment tend to do a few things differently.
They start early. A launch is not the beginning of discovery; it is the culmination of it. Steam's algorithm rewards games that arrive with momentum: wishlists, community activity, pre-existing coverage. Publishers who wait until launch week are already behind. The pre-launch phase, ideally beginning weeks or months before release, is when awareness gets built and the audience that makes a launch spike possible gets assembled.
They invest in editorial credibility, not just performance marketing. Paid social and search can drive traffic. But the thing that converts a curious browser into a paying player is usually a trusted editorial voice saying the game is worth their time. A review on a property their audience already reads. A preview from a writer who covers their genre seriously. This matters especially for the publisher whose game does not have a household name carrying it. They cannot out-spend Activision. But they can get their game covered by the publications their specific audience reads every day.
They match their game to the right community, not the biggest one. A smaller, highly relevant audience converts at a higher rate than a large, loosely matched one. A horror game placed in front of a dedicated horror gaming community will outperform the same creative in front of a general gaming audience. Genre-specific, community-native placement is not a consolation prize for publishers who cannot afford broad reach. It is a strategic advantage.
They do not treat launch as the only moment that matters. Post-launch coverage, including guides, tips, community content, and ongoing editorial, drives sustained discovery and keeps a title surfaced in search and recommendation algorithms. Many games find their largest audiences months after launch, when a guide article starts ranking or a property revisits a title for an update or DLC. Treating a campaign as a one-week sprint is one of the most common and most costly mistakes in game marketing.
Where GAMURS Fits In
GAMURS Group owns and operates 14 gaming and entertainment publications reaching 30 million monthly readers, including Destructoid, Twinfinite, Siliconera, We Got This Covered, Pro Game Guides, PC Invasion, Attack of the Fanboy, Operation Sports, and more.
But the number that matters most is not the total. It is what that total is made of.
Our network is not 30 million people who vaguely like games. It is a collection of distinct, passionate communities, each built around a specific corner of gaming culture. Siliconera's audience is the anime and JRPG community. Operation Sports is sports simulation. Pro Game Guides is the player looking for answers mid-session. Destructoid is the core gamer who has been reading serious gaming criticism for years. We Got This Covered crosses into entertainment and pop culture, reaching the casual-but-engaged player who will never show up in a traditional gaming media buy.
This matters because our GAMURS Pulse first-party data platform is built to reflect that specificity. We do not bucket every reader into a single "gaming enthusiast" segment. We track the behavioral signals that tell us what kind of gamer someone actually is: the genres they read about, the franchises they follow, the depth and frequency of their engagement, the content they come back to. That lets us build audience cohorts that are not approximations of your player. They are your player.
A horror publisher does not need to reach every gamer. They need to reach the readers in our network who consistently engage with horror gaming content. A cozy game does not need a broad buy. It needs to find the readers who spent thirty hours in Stardew Valley and are actively looking for their next title. An anime JRPG needs to land in Siliconera, not alongside it.
Solutions Built for Every Size of Publisher
One of the more frustrating realities of game marketing is that most media partnerships are built, implicitly or explicitly, for the largest budgets. The resources available to a major publisher are simply not accessible to the mid-size independent label or the studio self-publishing their first commercial title.
GAMURS works differently. We work with publishers at every stage, from a small indie team launching their first title to an established international label managing a full release calendar. The package looks different at each level, but the approach is the same: find the specific audience your game was built for, locate that audience within our network, and put your game in front of them through editorial channels that actually convert.
A targeted campaign on a single GAMURS property delivers something that a broad programmatic buy cannot: a genuine editorial voice, a specific community, and placement that feels native rather than purchased. A larger publisher running multiple launches across the year benefits from a standing partnership, a pre-agreed rate and process that removes the friction of a new negotiation for every title and ensures each game gets matched to the right property.
The game market is not getting less crowded. But publishers who invest in reaching the right audience, through channels their players actually trust, are consistently outperforming those who rely on the algorithm to do that work for them. With 66% of Steam games failing to recoup their publishing fee and 47.5% selling fewer than 100 copies, the cost of not marketing is no longer theoretical.
Getting Your Game in Front of the Right Players
The Steam catalog will not shrink. Competition will not ease. The average player's attention will not expand to accommodate 21,000 new games a year.
What separates the titles that break through from the ones that disappear is not luck, and increasingly it is not even just quality. It is whether the right players knew the game existed at the moment they were ready to buy.
If you are launching a game in the next six to twelve months and want to talk about building a campaign matched to your title and your audience, across editorial, display, newsletter, and social, we would like to hear from you. GAMURS works with publishers of all sizes, across all genres, with packages built around real budgets.
The right players are out there. They are engaging with our network right now.
