Too Many Games, Zero Good Options: How Discovery Broke the Internet

Open Steam on any given Tuesday. You'll see a front page packed with banners, daily deals, curated lists, and "recommended for you" sections that somehow feel completely off. Maybe you've been there — you scroll for twenty minutes, wishlist three things, and then just boot up the same game you've been playing for two years. Infinite choice, zero satisfaction.

This isn't a personal failing. It's a design problem that's gotten completely out of hand, and it's affecting everyone from the casual weekend gamer in Ohio to the indie developer who just spent three years building something genuinely special.

The Numbers Don't Lie — But They Don't Help Either

Steam alone added over 14,000 games in 2023. That's roughly 38 new titles every single day. The Apple App Store and Google Play push those numbers into the stratosphere when you add mobile. And on the streaming side, platforms like Twitch and YouTube Gaming are indexing millions of hours of content tied to all of it.

The kicker? According to data from Newzoo and various Steam visibility studies, the majority of games released each year sell fewer than 1,000 copies total. Not in their launch week — ever. Most games essentially disappear the moment they go live, swallowed whole by an algorithm that doesn't have time to care about them.

For players, this creates what researchers sometimes call "choice paralysis" — a psychological state where having too many options makes it harder, not easier, to decide. You'd think more games means more fun. In practice, it often means more frustration.

How Algorithms Decide What You See (And What You Don't)

Here's the thing about game discovery algorithms: they're not built to find you something great. They're built to keep you engaged with the platform. Those are related goals, but they're not the same thing.

Steam's algorithm, for example, leans heavily on wishlist conversions, review velocity, and purchase behavior from users with similar libraries to yours. Sounds reasonable on paper. In practice, it creates feedback loops. Games that already have visibility get more visibility. Games that launch quietly stay quiet. The rich get richer, as they say.

Twitch operates on a similar logic. A game's discoverability on the platform is tied to how many concurrent viewers it has — which means brand new games with no audience yet get buried under the weight of established titles. An indie dev who launches a game and tries to build a Twitch community around it is essentially starting from a hole in the ground.

"We launched in March and had maybe eight people watching our release stream," said Marcus Webb, a solo developer who released a narrative puzzle game called Hollow Signal earlier this year. "The algorithm doesn't see you until you're already seen. It's this catch-22 that nobody warns you about."

The Storefront Problem Gets Personal

Big storefronts like Steam, the Epic Games Store, and even console platforms like the PlayStation Store and Xbox Marketplace all face a version of the same issue: they're trying to serve wildly different audiences with a single recommendation engine.

A 45-year-old who plays strategy games on weekends and a 19-year-old grinding ranked matches every night are both "gamers," but their discovery needs look nothing alike. Broad-strokes algorithmic recommendations tend to default toward whatever's trending, which usually means whatever had the biggest marketing budget.

Epic has tried to cut through the noise with its free game program, essentially forcing discovery by removing the price barrier. It works, sort of — people download the free games, but engagement data suggests many never actually play them. Discovery without genuine interest is just hoarding.

Indie Devs Are Getting Creative (Out of Necessity)

Faced with algorithmic indifference, a growing number of indie developers are ditching traditional launch strategies entirely. Instead of hoping a storefront surfaces their game, they're building audiences directly — through TikTok devlogs, Discord communities, Kickstarter campaigns, and even old-school game festival circuits like PAX and IndieCade.

Jamila Torres, who co-developed a farming RPG with her partner out of their apartment in Austin, said their most effective marketing tool ended up being a 90-second TikTok showing a weird bug in their game that made crops grow into the sky. It got shared by a couple of gaming content creators, and suddenly their wishlist count jumped by 4,000 overnight.

"We didn't plan that," she laughed. "You can't plan that. The algorithm on TikTok rewarded chaos, and that chaos saved our launch."

That kind of viral luck isn't a strategy — it's a lottery ticket. But it points to something real: the platforms where authentic, weird, human content thrives are outperforming the cold recommendation engines of traditional storefronts when it comes to sparking genuine excitement.

What Actually Needs to Change

Players want better tools to find things that match their taste, not their demographic profile. Developers want a level playing field where quality has a fighting chance against marketing spend. Neither group is asking for the impossible.

Some smaller platforms are experimenting with solutions. itch.io has long operated with a more community-driven, human-curated discovery model that many indie devs swear by. GOG leans into editorial curation. Even Steam has introduced more tag-based and queue-based tools in recent years, though developers report mixed results.

The real fix probably isn't purely algorithmic. It's a combination of better human curation, smarter personalization that actually learns from your behavior over time, and maybe — just maybe — platforms being willing to surface something new even when it doesn't yet have the engagement metrics to justify it.

Until then, the algorithm keeps spinning. Thousands of games keep launching. And somewhere in the noise, there's probably something you'd absolutely love — if only either of you could find the other.

We'll keep our eyes open over here at 164343. That's kind of the whole point.