Valve says almost 6,000 games made over $100K on Steam last year
In a new talk at the Game Developers Conference Valve has shared some Steam data that, among other things, shows a lot of developers are making a lot of money. The March 10 presentation was given by communications lead Kaci Aitchison Boyle and Tom Giardino, who works on the business side of things, and various photographs of the slides shown were shared on BlueSky by GameDeveloper's Chris Kerr (first spotted by PCGN).
The headline stat is that 5,863 games earned more than $100,000 in revenue in 2025 on Steam, with the slide showing steady growth in this regard over the last five years: in 2020, just over 3,000 games earned as much. Obviously a lot of big publisher are included in that figure, but smaller developers are also finding considerable success on the platform.
Valve provided this stat in the context of worries about over-saturation on Steam, and Giardino says its approach to discovery is that "we just want to put the right games in front of the right customer." An example of its success in this regard are the platform's "daily deals." Valve says 1,500 games were featured as a daily deal last year, 69% of which had never featured in these sales before. 8.2 million Steam users bought at least one, which Valve says is an increase of 125% (presumably on 2024's figures).
And who doesn't love a good heatmap, eh? Valve threw a big old world map up on the slide showing the concentration of Steam users globally, and it starkly illustrates the platform's reach. Even when the concentration levels aren't especially high, there are still dots absolutely everywhere (obligatory shout-out to North Korea's sole Steam user).
Valve says more titles are finding success on Steam than ever before, despite concerns of over-saturation on the storefront.
— @kerrblimey.bsky.social (@kerrblimey.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-03-11T19:04:21.123Z
The Valve speakers also joke about the current global RAM shortage with regards to the company's upcoming hardware, which is still shown as coming in 2026 despite a recent delay. Attendee Hayden Dingman, once of PC Gamer, has this direct quote: "If you have a line on a bunch of RAM, we are in the market and would like to buy it."
Yes, a lot of games sell a lot of copies on Steam might not be the most shocking news you've ever heard, but it's always fascinating when Valve peels back the curtain and gives us a glimpse of the actual figures. The numbers are always big, just like when Valve went into detail on just how much data the platform is handling: Steam users downloaded 100 exabytes of games in 2025, and are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates every day.
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