Steam Spy report: 2016 saw overall spending stay at $3.3b, yet record high in game releases

Sergey Galyonkin, the man behind SteamSpy, has published the 2016 edition of his Steam end of year analysis, revealing some of the biggest winners and losers on the platform in 2016 and revealing that roughly $3.5b was spent on the platform through 2016 on games, although this doesn’t include cash spent on DLC or free-to-play titles.

This number is significant here because this is the same number that Galyonkin estimated in his 2015 round up for the platform, despite his estimations in November of this year that a third of all the games on Steam’s platform had been released this year, with the final tally being 5,245 games being added to Valve’s storefront in 2016.

You can see his full report here, and the information can be used by developers to assess Steam’s marketplace, and its current state, when considering projects for the year ahead. As ever, I always say that SteamSpy isn’t 100% accurate, but has often been lauded for its accuracy. In this case, Galyonkin himself says that "The margin of error on this particular number is quite high. I used three different methods to estimate the revenue and ended up with numbers ranging from $3.3B to $3.6B."

He blames a lot of this slow growth on Steam for a dearth of highly popular big-budget releases for Steam — and indeed several of the biggest games of the year were launched on Uplay and Origin, Ubisoft and EA’s competing platforms — but also in a slight slowdown when it comes to Steam uptake in both Europe and North America, where interest in premium titles is at its highest.