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Shadow of the App Store? Steam releases in 2014 already outnumber 2013

Steam's apparently inexorable march towards an anarchic, creator-driven storefront continues apace, with more games releasing through the service in the five months of 2014 to date than in the whole of 2013.

steam_greenlight

That's according to data harvested from Steam by Gamasutra.

The site fingers Greenlight as the culprit, since Valve has begun passing a couple hundred titles each month, but we'd also like to nominate Steam Early Access.

While it's great to give gamers and creators a way to interface, we're not the first to complain about how crowded the Steam store is becoming. Like the App Store, which is largely uncurated, it's getting harder and harder to find things on Steam.

That means indies need to spend way more money on marketing; users have to wade through guff to find treasures; and trying to stay abreast of new releases is pretty much impossible.

To its credit, Valve has made several changes to the platform to aid discoverability, such as improved recommendations, tags and user reviews.

I don't know, how do you feel about this? Is opening Steam to more developers a good thing, or is the chaos of the new release feed too unpleasant a trade off?

Thanks, Destructoid.

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Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

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Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.

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