2024, Steam has reached the highest number of games ever and has been ranked on 19,000 new gaming platforms in total. But only 4,041 of these games managed to go out of the status of “heated game” by winning enough popularity. The remaining 14.951 games were almost never played or purchased. Valve uses the “heated gaming” system to prevent low-quality games from filling the platform. This system requires new games to exceed a certain sales and player audience threshold.

What is the Restricted Game System in

Steam?

Valve offers features such as successes, game cards and badges to promote games on Steam. However, these features have been used for low-quality games and fraud-purpose content called “shovelware” over time. To prevent this, Valve began to keep new games initially in the status of “heated”.

Home Restricted games are unable to access these features and can only exceed this situation when they reach a certain number of sales or players. In 2024, 71% of the games added to Steam have been staged these limitations and almost no play by users. While this rate was 66% in 2020, it came to 72% in 2022 and reached 80% in 2024.

Steam pay attention to the growing number of games every year. However, this increase makes it difficult to realize quality content. 19,000 games published in 2024, although there is a large variety, the number of games not played or purchased by users is quite high.

While Valve’s quality control systems block the platform filling of low quality content, this can lead to the fact that many independent gaming developers can’t notice their projects. Steam is expected to wonder how to maintain this balance and shape future gaming publishing policies.