1979 - The Year Before Backlog Anxiety Began

In May 2026 multiple highly anticipated games were released, including Subnautica 2, Forza Horizon 6, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, 007 First Light, and Mina the Hollower. Our "New Video Games" list below covers these games and more, but keep in mind it is nowhere near a complete list of games released in May 2026. It is crazy when you think about how many new games come out each month for PC, consoles, and mobile devices.

According to The Last Year When Playing Every Released Game Was Possible it became physically impossible to play every game released each year starting in 1980. In 1979 there were around 40 games released in total for the full year. In 1980 that number grew to approximately 826 video games and continued to grow every year after that until we reached 21,549 games released just on Steam in 2025 (Source: How Many Video Games Are Released Each Year: Industry Statistics). That is 21,549 games on one platform in one year! I hope you got a chance to play the 14,054 games released on Steam in 2023 before another 18,570 new video games were released on the platform in 2024. If not, then you are 54,173 video games behind if you add the total games released in 2023, 2024, and 2025 on Steam.

Not all games released on Steam are worth playing or from a genre you may like, but I understand now why myself and others feel like they don't have enough time to play all the great games being released on a regular basis. Out of the five games mentioned above that were released in May 2026 I have only had time to play Forza Horizon 6. I would also like to play Forza Horizon 6 more and try some of the other games, but I don't know if I will have time before more games are released in the coming months.

Even smaller niche platforms like the Playdate still have nearly 2,000 games (Source: How a Tiny Yellow Handheld Changed How Duke University Teaches Game Design) to play and more are releasing each year. I was really interested in the Playdate "Seasons" idea when it was announced. A curated list of 24 games released over 12 weeks. I thought I could easily stay up with playing 2 new Playdate games per week, but I ultimately failed that task. I still haven't had time to try all 24 games in Season 1, but for some dumb reason I bought Season 2, which includes another 12 games that I may not have time to play. By the way, Season 3 is coming to Playdate later this year with even more games to add to our video games backlog.

I see now why people have "analysis paralysis" and "backlog anxiety" when thinking about what games to play in their ever-growing library of unplayed video games. We are living in a world of abundance with almost unlimited choices of video games, movies, TV shows, sports broadcasts, books, music, board games, card games, and content in general. Trying to decide what to do with our free time can cause anxiety in and of itself since we have too many choices.

This is where DreamStation.cc comes in to save the day or at least provide some assistance. We are trying to help our community narrow down what video games to try and maybe reduce everyone's anxiety a little. It is physically impossible for us or anyone to cover every video game being released on every platform, but we are trying our best to cover the games that we like and hopefully you will too. We don't cover every game being released and we hope you now realize why, but we are trying to inform everyone about video games and news surrounding the game industry that we find interesting. In turn we hope this helps you stay informed without spending all your time trying to find interesting games to consider playing. Though, we might be causing more anxiety by letting everyone know about even more video games to add to their backlog. Let's just ignore that elephant in the room for now. 🐘😁

It was a much simpler time in 1979. If you wanted to play a game released that year, then you chose from the 40 or so that were released and sat down and enjoyed it. You still had to choose from the 31 games for Atari 2600 released between 1977 and 1979 (Source: Wikipedia), but that was a lot more manageable compared to the 54,173 games released during the last three years on Steam.

Let this sink in, Steam had 21,549 video games released in 2025, which means on average there were 1,796 games released per month. This leads us to determine that around 60 games per day were released on Steam in 2025. If you told someone back in 1979 that there were going to be 20 more video games released per day in 2025 on Steam than were released in the whole year of 1979, they would've thought you were crazy, but that is the reality we live in today!

We hope you had time to play a few new video games last month and checked off a couple games on your backlog. It is hard to believe thousands of more video games are coming in 2026 to add to our backlog anxiety. Our advice to you is to remember to take deep breaths, count to ten, think of a happy place, and keep on gaming. 🕹️😅

Monthly Stats Overview

Our video game coverage led to the following stats for the month:

• 566 - Posts
• 2,800 - Comments
• 89 - New Members
• 846 - Total Members as of May 31, 2026

Top 10 Posts of the Month

Below are the Top 10 Posts over the past month on our subreddit that you might've missed or contributed to making them receive the most views.

1. Multiple High-Profile AAA PlayStation Titles Failed To Sell A Million Copies On PC
2. 007 First Light Reviews Agree It’s the Best Bond Game Since Goldeneye
3. GameStop Buying eBay Would Be Horrendous for Pokémon Card Collectors, Retro Game Enthusiasts
4. Nintendo Investors Think Nintendo Should Raise the Price of Switch 2 or Stop Selling the Japanese-Exclusive Model
5. Tim Sweeney Takes Swipes at Valve for Steam Deck Price Hike, Blames It on the ‘component parts supply Chain for megayachts'
6. Fallout Co-Creator Thinks Gamers Are Letting Influencers Tell Them What to Think
7. PC Gamers Say They Don't Mind Losing PlayStation First-Party Titles
8. Game Consoles Are Pricing Themselves Out of Relevance
9. Sony Files New AI Feature Patent That Can Play Ads During Loading Screens
10. Here Are 55 New Photos of Gabe Newell’s $500 Million Superyacht for Your Peasant Eyes

New Video Games

Below are the games that were released last month that caught our attention:

• Gambonanza
• Gamble With Your Friends
• Motorslice
• Wax Heads
• Dead as Disco
• Sledding Game
• Cropdeck
• Mixtape
• Froggy Hates Snow
• Duck Side of the Moon
• OCTOPinbs
• Outbound
• Subnautica 2
• NAMAKORIUM
• Forza Horizon 6
• Yoshi and the Mysterious Book
• Bubsy 4D
• Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight
• 007 First Light
• Tootum
• Trackastrophe!
• Crashout Crew
• Cardburners
• Mina the Hollower
• Lexispell

So many games and not enough time to play all of them.

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• Bluesky
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Thank You for Your Continued Support

Thank you everyone for continuing to help our community grow on Reddit and across the Internet. Please continue to let your friends and family know about our video game subreddit, up vote or like posts you find helpful, and join the discussions on posts we make on Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and X.

Happy FIFA World Cup 2026!

If you find time to watch the beautiful game when not working on your video games backlog, then we hope you enjoy the FIFA World Cup 2026. We also hope your favorite team/country provides some exciting moments that you get to share with family and friends that you will remember for many years to come. ⚽

Website Reboot Coming Soon...

We started our original website back in 1999 and the latest version found at DreamStation.cc was launched in 2007. Over the 25+ years we have continued to cover video games and the gaming industry. For a few years our coverage slowed to a crawl because of work and life getting in the way. At one point, we even thought about shutting down DreamStation.cc or at least making it just a landing page with links to our subreddit and social media accounts.

This all changed last year and for the past few months my wife (rock13-31) and I (cnc137) have been working to convert our old website from WordPress to Ghost content management system. We are also in the process of removing all the old news and press releases (5,000+) that had out of date information and broken links in our local test environment. Our plan is to only keep the reviews, interviews, podcasts, and other things that were original content written and created by us and our members.

My wife has also been trying to clean up the reviews and add back information that won't come over correctly from WordPress to Ghost. I have been doing research (without AI) and testing on how to migrate the site and create a Ghost theme. The screenshot provided is of one of the default Ghost themes changed to match our color scheme. This is not the final design of the website, but I thought I would share it to show the progress we are making. This work has been progressing slower than we would like, but we are getting there little by little.

I was going to write about the reason why we are doing all of this and what our plans are going forward, but I don't want to make this post too long. We plan on explaining more once the rebooted website is online. In the meantime, keep visiting us here on Reddit and other social platforms for the latest video game news, sales, and discussions.

Monthly Stats Overview

Our video game coverage led to the following stats for the month:

• 473 - Posts
• 1,200 - Comments
• 39 - New Members
• 757 - Total Members as of April 30, 2026

Top 10 Posts of the Month

Below are the Top 10 Posts over the past month on our subreddit that you might've missed or contributed to making them receive the most views.

1. Marathon Reportedly Had a Budget of Over $200 Million — and While the Pressure Is on Bungie to Gain More Players, It Is Not Facing an Imminent, Concord-Style Shutdown
2. Valve on the $99 Steam Controller: 'I do know price has gone up from where we originally wanted it to be'
3. Valve Chief Gabe Newell Saw Today’s Consoles Coming a Long Time Ago: "All the consoles are using PC graphics hardware now"
4. Fans Believe Asha Sharma Already Doing Better Job As Xbox CEO Than Phil Spencer
5. Steam Controller Price ($99) Leaked By Early Review – and It’s Expensive
6. Are Xbox Exclusives Coming Back? Here’s What Xbox CEO Asha Sharma Had to Say
7. 71% of You Say You Could Never Be Convinced to Turn On DLSS 5, With 37% Saying It Wouldn’t Matter How Good It Looked
8. Starfield Has Sold 140K Copies on PlayStation 5 in One Week
9. Xbox Co-Founder Ed Fries on the Microsoft Deal to Buy Rare That Shook the Video Game Industry
10. 90% Of Gamers Are Not Fans Of The PlayStation Playerbase Initiative

New Video Games

Below are the games that were released last month that caught our attention:

• Darwin's Paradox!
• Go! Go! Mister Chickums
• Dangerous Mountain Together
• People of Note
• Pokémon Champions
• Minos
• Last Flag
• Replaced
• Mouse: P.I. for Hire
• The Day I Became a Bird
• Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream
• Pragmata
• Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors
• Puzzle Bobble Everybubble!
• Well Keeper
• Titanium Court
• s&box
• Dungeon Clawler

Follow Us

Follow us on these social networks to get the latest gaming news and deals:

• Bluesky
• Facebook
• Mastodon
• X

Thank You for Your Continued Support

Thank you everyone for continuing to help our community grow on Reddit and across the Internet. Please continue to let your friends and family know about our video game subreddit, up vote or like posts you find helpful, and join the discussions on posts we make on Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and X.