Valve says Steam users downloaded 100 exabytes of games in 2025, and are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates every day
Valve recently published its Steam Year in Review for 2025, which is a big old list of things it has improved on the platform over the year for developers and publishers. Much of it won't be of particular interest to players, unless you're gagging to find out how Valve is messing with calendars and recommendations in order to better surface games, but the conclusion has some very big numbers relating to Steam's users and behaviour. And who doesn't like a big number?
The unsurprising fact is that the platform is seeing "consistent long term growth […] Five years ago, Steam was growing steadily and crossed the 25 million concurrent user mark for the first time. In the years since, we’ve grown at a pace of around 3.4 million additional concurrent users per year, reaching 42 million peak concurrent users."
And all those people are downloading a hell of a lot of stuff, to the extent that today I discovered what an exabyte is. An exabyte is a unit of measurement for data that is equal to 1000 petabytes or one quintillion bytes (that's a "one" followed by 18 zeroes). It's so large that it's a measurement used for things like estimating daily internet traffic, and Wikipedia tells me it would take around a quarter-of-a-million high end home PCs to store this amount of data.
"In 2024 we delivered about 80 exabytes to customers," says Valve, "and in 2025 that grew to 100 exabytes. It's hard to make sense of such a huge number, but just for fun: Steam users are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates per day—that's 11.42 petabytes per hour, which is about 190,000 GB of data per minute."
And I thought I was doing well with a download speed of 100Mbps. Valve further says it's paying out more revenue than ever to developers and, thanks to the revenue share tiers it launched in 2018 (75% and 80% depending on sales), "the revenue share paid out across all non-Valve games on Steam in 2025 was 76%, and that does not include any revenue developers may earn selling free Steam keys outside of Steam."
Steam's in the business of selling games and, boy, business is good. No wonder Gabe Newell was able to cap off 2025 by taking delivery of a new $500 million superyacht with a submarine garage, on-board hospital and 15 gaming PCs.
2026 games: All the upcoming games
Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together