Game Dev

Steam made $16B but most games made $0.

The excellent website SteamDB contains a mountain of data all about Steam, for example they track all games released per year which allows them to build some really nice graphs.

Based on those stats there were 19,606 games published in 2025, and out of those only 3,186 got over 100 reviews while 9,550 got under 10 reviews.

There are some more stats on this 80.lv report where they mention the estimated $16.2B in total Steam revenue compared to $15B in 2024.

Gamalytic has some more stats, where the median revenue per game in 2025 is $318, where only 23.4% of games made over $5k.

But as always while these charts seem a bit scary, they make it seem that success is impossible, that is really not the reality. Keep in mind how this includes literally ALL games published on Steam, meaning it includes games that were made by professional developers with the intent of making a living, but it also includes hobbyist games from developers just making something for fun with no intent of making money, it includes someone's first Flappy Bird game clone as they're learning, it also includes a bunch of random Asset Flips and even some AI slop.

If you’re a professional developer then you’re NOT competing with all those 19,606 games.

It would be nice if there was a way to separate those two categories, professional vs non-professional games but I don't think there's any way to slice the data like that.

For example it is interesting to see how the rate of successful games stays relatively constant. This chart showcases how games over 100 reviews are slowly increasing year by year, with just a slight dip compared to last year. So there are simultaneously more games that don't find an audience at all, and also more games that find massive success.

It is crazy to see how many awesome games came out this year from tiny teams that found insane success:

• R.E.P.O. -> $136M

• Schedule I (solo dev) -> $130M

• PEAK -> $83M

• Hollow Knight: Silksong -> $77M

• Dispatch -> $54M

• Escape from Duckov -> $53M

• DELTARUNE -> $28M

• RV There Yet? -> $28M

• Megabonk (solo dev) -> $27M

Affiliate

New Year Sale, FREE Environment

The year is coming to an end so the Unity Asset Store is running a New Year Sale!

Most of the usual Top Assets are 50% OFF, if you’re looking for recommendations you can watch my Highlights from Black Friday and all of those are on sale.

My own Toolkit asset is on sale! Next year I will be adding tons of Tools and Elements to it and if you pick it up right now you get all of those as FREE Updates!

The Publisher of the Week this time is NOT_Lonely, it’ a published with a variety of tools, visuals and vfx.

Get the FREE HQ Apocalyptic Environment which is a park with a nice destroyed environment.

Get it HERE and use coupon NOTLONELY2025 at checkout to get it for FREE!

If you’re interested in realistic environments then there’s a HumbleBundle out right now with a ton of them at an insane 99% OFF discount!

Includes a Carnival, Apocalyptic Hospital, Gothic church, Feudal Japan, Pharaoh theme, Medieval, Elven, etc. Lots of variety to make tons of games!

Get it HERE!

Tech

Build YouTube Games with AI

YouTube is launching a closed Beta test for something they call Playables Builder, this is where you can use Gemini 3 to create games from text, video or image prompts. It's part of their Playables program that allows developers to make games that run in the browser, and now using AI tools creators can also make games.

In terms of tech I think this might be an excellent way to seriously test these AI tools as they are being built. Previously AI wasn't capable of building anything decent, but now it is definitely quite a lot more capable.

Sadly the games aren't available here in Portugal so I can't play them for myself, but I looked at some video gameplay and the games look pretty decent, they basically look like beginner games that someone with 1 month of experience in Unity could build. This is a great way for people with 0 skills to start creating something, and then hopefully they want to build more and more complex games which then leads them to something like Unity or Unreal.

But if you as a game dev are feeling scared of this let me just repeat what I say every time I write about AI. Look at this as a tool meant to help you, not replace you. The days where AI can build a complete compelling game like Hollow Knight off a single prompt are still very very far away (and when that happens the whole world will change)

So don't be afraid of these tools, look at them and try to think of how they can help you make better games. For example I think this could be an excellent testing ground for ideas. I've previously written about an interesting strategy that indie devs can follow where you can look at the top games on Roblox and Fortnite, and remake your own custom version of those for Steam. In the same way here with this program you can look at the top YouTube Playables games and then expand upon it and make a proper Steam version. This can be an excellent tool for developers in terms of idea validation.

And of course there are also handmade Playables games without AI, they have their normal SDK where you can build these games using normal code, there is even an experimental wrapper for Unity and one for Godot

Fun

Explore game levels in your browser!

Sometimes I find some amazing websites that I can't believe someone made. This time it's an awesome nostalgia filled website where you can fly through your favorite classic game levels!

It's called noclip.website and you can browse levels for about 100 games like Super Mario Galaxy, Wii Sports, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, GTA3, Half-Life 2, and tons more!

You select the game, then select the level, and it loads the 3D model within the browser. Then you can just use the Mouse and WASD to fly around! Super cool!