Sixteen players. Zero players. One glowing review. One pan. Both free. Both launched May 12 on Steam. Both landed on the New Releases chart. One is trending up. The other is already gone.

The Azure One, a free indie RPG from developer 好运风 (Breezeborne Games), surged 1,500% in concurrent players to reach — well, 16 people. Its sole Steam review is positive. The game follows a boy named Qiuxu through a coming-of-age story at Second Municipal High School. Tiny numbers, but momentum matters when you’re starting from nothing.

Then there’s Orbit’s Grocery. A free action-adventure from Cosmic Wage Workers that promises genre-bending retail chaos — FPS mini-games, racing segments, horror encounters sandwiched between shelf-stocking shifts. Zero concurrent players at time of tracking. Its single review is negative. The game flatlined on arrival.

Here’s the brutal math: making your game free doesn’t solve the visibility problem. According to SteamDB data reported by TechSpot, Steam saw 19,112 game releases in 2025. Nearly half — 9,327 titles — attracted fewer than 10 user reviews. For 2,229 games, the review count sat at zero. Nobody showed up, nobody said a word.

The barrier to publishing on Steam is functionally gone. The barrier to being noticed has never been higher. Alex Harding, founder of indie games outlet The IndiEXP, described the trend plainly: “The battle for indie game discoverability will only get more difficult with there being more games launching each and every day and less press media keeping their heads above water to cover them.”

Free-to-play was supposed to be the on-ramp — drop the price to zero, let the product speak for itself. Instead it’s one more lane in gridlock. The Azure One’s 1,500% spike is a feel-good stat until you realize it represents 16 people in a stadium built for millions. Orbit’s Grocery didn’t even manage that.

Both games sit on the New Releases chart. Both are still free. That chart refreshes daily.

Sources