I have been documenting every steam game released for the last 4 months. Here is what I found.

You can take a look at the living document here.

If you want to keep up with me I post these pages on: "@retroragexd.bsky.social" and "@RetrorageXD" on twitter.

I know it is pretty obvious from the vibes that the steam store is almost filled with mostly trash, but it does not hurt to have some numbers.

Basically, if the game is at least "complete" and decently polished I will add the games name somewhere on the page. If there are lots of games released that day, the filter becomes stronger. And this is for mostly English Games.

Obviously this filter is subjective, but I think I got a pretty accurate eye for quality / potential of games.

I would categorize the shovelware into 5 categories.

1.The most common type of "Shovel Ware" That I see are Engine asset collections. These are games built on game engine templates from premade assets. Not to say that you cannot make a great game this way, but most do not put the amount of effort / time needed for a successful game.

2.CopyCats / Clones / Trendware. Not to say that a copycat / clone cannot work if given some different mechanics and good twists. Most are just straight up clones with different skins. Unfortunately the popularity of roguelites recently have spawned many a clones of these popular games such as "Vampire Survivors", "Slay the Spire", "Balatro". These three games I would say are the biggest categories of roguelite clones that have spawned -> Survival Roguelite, Deckbuilding Roguelite, Gambling Roguelite" Correspondingly.

1. Walking simulators. Derived from Engine asset collections, this is a specific subset of asset collections that pertain to FPS Horror style games of markiplier's 3 scary games except most are not very well made and there is a lot of supply of these.

4.Since the turn of the new year, I have seen a significant jump in game containing AI generated assets.

5.Simply incomplete games, these are games with potential, but miss the mark on completion, whether that be barebone assets, or the game design was not thought out enough.

TLDR / Conclusion:
80% of the games could be removed from the store to help out the visibility/success of the 20%.

I really think steam should have curation built in to their steam store. I would think they would have enough money to hire a group of people to look over games that are submitted to the store, but I don't think they care because devs, have to put in money to have their game listed so it's basically free money for steam for these questionable games being released.

I understand that there are steam curators etc. But most people do not even look at the store really because we know that 80%+ of it is actual shovelware. Which is why marketing / influence is so lucrative in the industry.

I think the console space has it better because there is more investment required that filters out low quality stuff, but even then you have wack games coming out on console sometimes from people just throwing around money.

Right now steam kind of has a monopoly on the PC gaming space, but if I get enough resources I would like to make a new storefront that has supports new developers and IPs.

Anyway, just throwing this out there.