I noticed there were a lot of new baseball video games on Steam this year. The most ever in a year on the platform. I try to record every baseball game, so this has added to my workload a bit. Let’s talk about it.

A new peak of PC releases

I keep a Notion database with a list of all the baseball games I know about. This isn’t a perfect list, and I will still commonly run into old games I never heard of. I just heard about obscure Korean arcade game Magicball Fighting for the first time today. But I can say confidently it’s a representative list.

The chart above counts games released for Windows PC by year. There’s a little bit of a “what is DOS vs. what is Windows” question on the early part of things that I need to clean up, but that distinction goes away around 1995.

The mid-’90s were the peak for multimedia software. Lots of uh, baseball-related titles came out for PC back then, though some of them you might hesitate to call “games.” Many were more like software encyclopedias, or collections of video and audio and text that you can click around in. If it’s interactive software about baseball, I still count it.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, PC baseball games whittled away. Only a few came out each year. A Backyard Baseball here, a Pro Yakyuu Team o Tsukurou game there. There were fewer baseball games overall, and 90% of them only came out for consoles.

Recently, PC baseball games have started trending up again. These mostly aren’t AAA releases, though Konami contributed with eBaseball: Pro Spirit and eBaseball: Pro Spirit 2026 recently. Mostly these are small games from small teams, releasing digitally only on Steam.

So, let’s dig into what came out in 2026 and see what we can learn.

Baseball games released on Steam in 2026

(in release order)

Road to Omaha: College Baseball Dynasty – A college baseball general manager game. Sign players, sim games, keep building up your team year over year.
eBaseball: Pro Spirit – A free-to-play 3D action baseball game, focused on online competition.
Out of the Park Baseball 27 – A general manager game. It’s been coming out every year for 27 years.
HoloBase – A barely-there Bases Loaded clone with VTuber characters. A 2D action baseball game, but with extremely simplified gameplay.
Baseball Legacy Manager 26 – A general manager game.
Indoor Baseball – A 3D action baseball game with fairly simple one-v-one gameplay and set inside a house between two kids.
Game Pulse Payoff Pitch – A computer adaptation of a dice and cards tabletop baseball tactics game.
Backyard Baseball – A 3D action baseball game. Mostly a nice-looking 3D remake of the 1994 original with some new features.
The TEAM game:Corgi&me – An everything-against-the-wall action and team management game where you run a corgi baseball team.
Diamond-Die – A dice-based baseball tactics game.
Paper Baseball – A very small, simple number guessing game that gets extrapolated into baseball results for flavor.
Hakoniwa Base Ball – A general manager game.
eBaseball: Pro Spirit 2026 – A full-fat AAA 3D action baseball game set in NPB.
Baseball Empire – A general manager game.
Ore ga Kyuushin Da! Sharp-Eyed Umpire Simulator – An umpire game where you call balls and strikes.
BALL BOY Simulator – A small indie narrative/horror-ish game where you pick up baseballs after practice at a Japanese high school.

This is a lot more than a typical year of Steam baseball games. Even back when there was a spam of low effort VR home run derby games, it didn’t exceed this number.

“Indiepocalypse” has been thrown around for over a decade now, as people say supply of indie games will outstrip any demand for them. I think that’s obviously been true for the last several years, and is clearly now getting worse.

Increasingly, making an indie game is buying a lottery ticket. A small handful will go viral and make millions, like Among Us or Meccha Chameleon. And thousands of others will sell 0-100 copies and make nothing.

Of the indie games above, Indoor Baseball would have to be the highest quality. It has 17 reviews and an all-time peak of 12 players, so I would guess it’s sold a few hundred copies. It may have made a few thousand dollars. It is made by a solo dev, but I still don’t think this would be enough to make a living on.

Why are there so many games?

Is AI powering a new Indiepocalypse?

Steam asks developers where they are using AI in developing their games. This information is presented on the game’s store page.

Unfortunately, there’s no rule that developers have to tell the truth when they fill this out.

The TEAM game:Corgi&Me is loud and proud about its AI use. It was used for graphics and music and text translation. It’s a game mostly made by AI.

On the other hand, Diamond-Die looks less honest, to my eyes. Its page says AI was used only for debugging code. Its UI looks similar to this openly AI-coded game on itch.io, and I found the in-game text bewildering in a way that smells like AI to me. Examples:

“That one died a quick death, but the order keeps turning.”
“The booth is calling that one a rope and nobody is filing an appeal.”
“The batter spits on the junk and strolls into the plot.”
“A little seeing eye trouble and now the basepaths have traffic.”
“Strikeout looking with backward K energy”
Whatever this all means:

A pop-up in Diamond-Die that says Chalk Line Chaos. "Everything around the foul lines gets messy for a beat. Pick where the mess works for you."

Feels like an AI told to be a little quirky while coming up with baseball stuff to say.

Anyway, while I can never know, of the 16 games above, 8 confirm they used AI as part of the game making process.

That is pretty clearly an undercount.

While general manager games have always been a good match for a mouse-driven platform like PC, there are so many brand new ones this year. I think this is clearly because a menu-driven sim game like this is something you can vibe code just about start to finish. A game that requires animation and physics but is otherwise pretty low effort for a human to make, like a basic R.B.I. Baseball clone, is nowhere to be found here.

AI clearly makes it easier to make a complete game and get it out there for people to play. And I think it clearly leads to a lower average quality of released games on Steam.

Anyway, had to get that off my chest. It’s a bit frustrating when I have a completionist project like this to have to pay little bits of money for low-effort indie games, which now require less effort than ever. Feels like I’m just getting scammed. It’s not totally uninteresting, but… I would rather see what a dedicated human can do than what the bots can do.