GAMES ARE
EATING THE WORLD

The Index

Everything on this page is a public number. What is not public is the arithmetic between them.

The cross-connections

Each of these joins two figures that are published separately and never together.

The Scissors 5.5× Supply grows this many times faster than money.
How it is calculated Steam releases 19,112 (2025) to a projected 23,958 (2026), up 25.4 percent. Market up 4.6 percent.
The Release Clock 3.1 min A new game appears this often, around the clock.
How it is calculated 66 games a day on Steam plus 400 on itch.io equals 466 a day.
AI Share of Growth 64 % This much of all growth in new Steam games is AI-flagged.
How it is calculated AI launches went from 13 to 530 a month, up 517. Non-AI went from 1,030 to 1,320, up 290.
The Pile 22 years Non-stop playtime to finish one year of Steam releases.
How it is calculated 23,958 games times an assumed 8 hours equals 191,664 hours. At two hours a day it would be 263 years.
Above the Line 1.6 % Share of 2025 Steam releases that passed 1 million USD.
How it is calculated 300 of 19,112 titles. The rest, 98.4 percent, stayed below.
One Jam vs Steam 1.3× A single game jam out-shipped the entire Steam store, per day.
How it is calculated 1,170 games in 14 days equals 84 a day, against 66 a day on Steam.
Games per 100k Repos 140.6 New games measured against all new code on GitHub.
How it is calculated 170,090 games a year against 121 million new repos.
What One Player Sees 0.0088 % Share of a year of new games one person actually plays.
How it is calculated Assuming 15 titles played a year against 170,090 new ones.
The Mean Lies 2.09m USD Average PC revenue per Steam release, a number almost nobody earns.
How it is calculated Illustration only: PC market 39.9 billion USD divided by 19,112 titles. In reality over 98 percent sit below it, because the distribution is extremely skewed.

The raw numbers

Metric Value as of Source
Global games market 205.0bn USD 2026-12-31 Newzoo Global Games Market Report
Players worldwide 3.6bn 2025-12-31 Newzoo
Steam releases per year 19,112 2025-12-31 SteamDB
Steam releases per day 66 2026-06-30 SteamDB, eigene Ableitung
Steam releases with AI disclosure 30.8 % 2026-07-15 Sulka Haro / PC Gamer
Titles above 1m USD 300 2025-12-31 Branchenauswertungen 2025
Games on itch.io 1.0m 2026-07-31 itch.io
New itch.io games per day 400 2026-02-19 itch.io, Thank You Itch
New GitHub repos per year 121.0m 2025-12-31 GitHub Octoverse 2025
Repos importing an LLM SDK 1.1m 2025-08-31 GitHub Octoverse 2025
Games in the first vibe coding jam 1,170 2025-04-01 Vibe Code Game Jam 2025, Rueckblick auf vibecoding.app

Method and sources

Every raw figure carries a source and the date the source refers to, not the date we fetched it. Where sources disagree we keep both numbers and say why they differ, instead of quietly averaging them.

Rounding happens in the display, never in the data. The exact value stays one click away under How it is calculated.

Derived figures are marked as ours. Two of them rest on an explicit assumption: the pile uses eight hours of playtime per game, and the attention share assumes fifteen games played per year. Both are stated so you can disagree with the assumption rather than with the arithmetic.

One figure is deliberately labelled a warning. Average revenue per release is a real division, but almost nobody earns it, because the distribution is extremely skewed. It is shown to make that point, not to describe a typical game.