Technology and game development are unrecognizable from the industry that the world experienced 30 or 40 years ago, the days of Pong and poor-quality graphics are long gone and pretty much everything has changed. Gaming as an industry has been revolutionized, and though in the early days of PC and console gaming, we may have seen a handful of games released every month, the figures are astronomical now.
Players now access their favorite genre of games on Steam or the PlayStation or Xbox store, and we see all kinds of games from MMORPGs to simulation games and even classic word games, getting to the bottom of the numbers might not be an exact science, but we’re delving into the scale of game releases in this guide.
Casino Gaming Means Hundreds of New Releases
Slot games, table games, and even more inventive casino games are still being released, and there are dozens of different casino gaming developers all creating new games all the time. A look at a casino brand online will show that there are many different themes and plenty of different games being released by these companies to fulfill new themes and appeal to new audiences.
People who are looking to play online slots for real money will often see new games being added to the libraries, and we even have games in the gambling industry that have been successful enough to warrant sequels. Slot games have come a long way since the one-armed bandit mechanical machines with reels that fell into place, and now rely on a random number generator to determine the outcome, and this has led to more mini-games and interesting gameplay mechanisms.
One study found that there are over 600 different developers and that these release on average seven games per year each, which means the number of casino games could be growing by over 4,000 annually, though this isn’t an exact number. A survey crawled the internet and found around 27,000 unique games offered by these developers alone. Casino games such as slots and new takes on poker and blackjack can’t be ignored when considering how many games are released.
Games Released on Steam
Valve Corporation gave us Steam over 20 years ago, creating one of the most amazing examples of technological advances, tracking what has happened in the last 20 years of games as we’ve been through blocky graphics in Minecraft through to new-age fantasy and sci-fi games. What started with relatively humble beginnings has gone on to become the biggest platform for people to download games for their computers.
Good business stories always start with underdogs, and while Steam started with just a few releases (compared to today’s standard) by 2022 it had hit 10,000 games per year distributed by the Steam app on peoples’ computers.
Physical CDs containing games sound novel to some people now, but some of us taking them home to install, Valve’s behemoth platform has given independent developers a way to connect with their customers without having to get complex distribution deals to get CD roms in storefronts – we’re now in the age of the indie developer.
Online gameplay is huge as people have better internet connections and many other games are now played online, and as players connect with others, as of 2023, there are 33 million concurrent users at any one time on the Steam Platform.
Is Console Still King?
Playing on a console is still the best option to many people, with the likes of PlayStation and Xbox leading the race; Xbox alone has more than 10,000 different games available to customers, some of them through the Game Pass program, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch also have thousands of games and millions of players of their consoles, and this is just the current generation of consoles; you can still get your hands on a Gameboy or PS1 if you’re into that.
Studies have relied a bit on guesswork with some saying there could be over five million different video games and online games in existence, and that have been published over recent decades.
Why it is Impossible to Get an Exact Figure
Casinos, consoles, and PC platforms all tend to make it possible to check how many games they offer at any given time, but it is not easy to work out how many games there are in total or how many are released in a year, as there are so many different methods companies use to reach their audiences.
Blockbuster games and independent titles alike, some game platforms share the number of games on their platform as a vanity metric, though many games are released in multiple ways through multiple retailers, which makes it even more difficult to know exactly how many are unleashed every year, it is certain that the number of games released is now in the tens of thousands annually.
