Valve doesn’t publish official Steam financial statements, but independent analytics firm Alinea Analytics estimates the platform generated $11.1 billion in gross revenue during the first half of 2026 – the strongest six-month stretch in Steam’s history. The figure, published by Alinea’s Head of Market Analysis Rhys Elliott on July 9, 2026, marks a 14.5% jump over the first half of 2025 and an 8% gain over the second half of 2025, a period that typically outperforms thanks to winter holiday sales. But the headline number hides a more interesting story: 79% of that Steam revenue came from games released before 2026. Steam’s growth engine this year isn’t new blockbusters – it’s Valve’s 117,000-game back catalog, and that shift carries real implications for publishers, for antitrust litigation working through federal court, and for how the rest of the PC gaming industry competes with Valve’s marketplace.
Steam’s Record-Breaking First Half, By the Numbers
Alinea Analytics, an independent games-industry analytics firm, put Steam’s H1 2026 gross revenue at $11.1 billion (roughly €9.71 billion), up 14.5% year-over-year and 8% ahead of H2 2025. Because Valve is privately held and does not disclose Steam’s finances, third-party estimates like Alinea’s – along with rival tracker GameDiscoverCo – are the closest the industry gets to an official number. Analysts caution that the two firms’ totals use different methodologies and shouldn’t be added together or treated as directly comparable. The figures were independently corroborated by Tom’s Hardware and Notebookcheck.
Context helps show the scale. $11.1 billion in six months is more than Steam made in all of pandemic-boom 2020 ($7.2 billion), and it comes within striking distance of the platform’s full 2021 total ($11.4 billion) – a year Steam has spent since not just matching, but building on, every single half-year that followed.
| Period | Gross Revenue | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 (full year) | ~$5.5B | Alinea Analytics baseline estimate |
| 2020 (full year) | $7.2B | Pandemic-era demand spike |
| 2021 (full year) | $11.4B | Nearly matched by H1 2026 alone |
| 2025 (full year) | ~$16.9B | GameDiscoverCo estimate (different methodology) |
| H1 2026 (six months) | $11.1B | +14.5% YoY vs. H1 2025; +8% vs. H2 2025 |
The 79% Problem: Old Games Are Carrying New Games
The more revealing number in Alinea’s report isn’t the topline $11.1 billion – it’s the composition. Games released before 2026 accounted for 79% of that Steam revenue; new 2026 releases brought in only 21%. That’s a steep drop from recent years: new releases made up 29% of H1 revenue in 2024, then 27% in H1 2025, and now just 21% in H1 2026 – three straight half-years of decline.
Part of that is simple math. Steam’s back catalog is enormous and getting bigger, now standing at more than 117,000 games and growing by roughly 17,000 titles a year. Every year adds more competition for a new release’s launch-window attention, while proven back-catalog titles keep collecting sales through Valve’s seasonal sales events, algorithmic recommendations, and bundle promotions. It also reflects a maturing library: with two decades of releases now searchable and wishlist-able, discovery increasingly favors games that already have reviews, guides, and word-of-mouth behind them over anything brand new.
For publishers, the back-catalog share is a mixed signal – good news if you own a deep library of older hits, uncomfortable news if next quarter’s roadmap depends on a single new launch converting wishlists into day-one revenue.
The Top-Selling Games Fueling Steam’s H1 2026 Haul
Even with new releases shrinking as a share of Steam revenue, several 2026 titles still posted enormous individual numbers. Racing game Forza Horizon 6 led all new releases at $197.7 million from roughly 3.5 million copies sold. Capcom’s survival-horror sequel Resident Evil Requiem wasn’t far behind at $194.5 million and 3.4 million copies on Steam alone – a title that went on to cross 7 million lifetime units and helped drive a double-digit profit jump at Capcom. Pearl Abyss’s new IP Crimson Desert cleared $190 million since its March launch, proving a completely new franchise can still break through. Early-access roguelike sequel Slay the Spire 2 sold 7.1 million copies for $141.7 million, and Krafton’s Subnautica 2 added $133.6 million on its way to 5 million total sales. The most unusual entry: budget title Meccha Chameleon, priced at just $6, generated “only” $71.3 million but topped the charts by units sold – a reminder that low price points can still move enormous volume on a platform with Steam’s reach, a breakdown Tech4Gamers also flagged as one of the stranger footnotes in Alinea’s report.
| Game | H1 2026 Revenue | Units Sold | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forza Horizon 6 | $197.7M | ~3.5M | #1 new release by revenue |
| Resident Evil Requiem | $194.5M | ~3.4M | 8.9% wishlist conversion rate |
| Crimson Desert | $190M+ | n/a | New IP, launched March 2026 |
| Slay the Spire 2 | $141.7M | 7.1M | Early access |
| Subnautica 2 | $133.6M | n/a | Krafton-published |
| Meccha Chameleon | $71.3M | n/a | #1 by UNIT sales, $6 price point |
What’s Driving the Growth: China, Pricing, and Publisher Homecomings
Alinea’s report points to several overlapping growth drivers behind the record. The first is geographic: a continued influx of Asian players, particularly from China, onto Steam’s marketplace. The second is pricing – AAA publishers have pushed launch prices higher industry-wide, which lifts revenue even when unit sales stay flat. Third, several viral co-op hits pulled in large, engaged audiences that then spent on in-game content and gifted copies to friends. Fourth, publishers have gotten measurably better at back-catalog monetization: seasonal sales, franchise bundles, and algorithmic “if you liked this” placement now do more work converting existing owners into repeat buyers.
The fifth driver is the most interesting for competitive analysis: publishers who spent recent years experimenting with proprietary launchers – EA App, Ubisoft Connect, and similar first-party storefronts – are, in Alinea’s words, quietly returning to Steam. That’s a notable reversal. Major publishers spent much of the last decade trying to route players around Valve’s commission through their own launchers, subscription services, and direct-sale websites, with mixed results. Alinea’s data suggests those experiments are being scaled back in favor of simply meeting players where they already are: a marketplace with 147 million monthly users, per Valve’s own figures.
Steam vs Epic Games Store: A Widening Gap
Steam’s chief PC-storefront rival, Epic Games Store, had a genuinely strong year by its own standards – full-year 2025 revenue of $1.16 billion, up 6% from 2024’s $1.09 billion, according to Epic’s year-in-review as reported by PC Gamer. Third-party developer spending on the Epic Games Store hit a record $400 million in 2025, up 57% year-over-year, and monthly active users reached a record 78 million in December 2025.
The Structural Trade-Off
Set next to Steam, though, the scale gap is stark. Steam’s H1 2026 revenue alone – just six months – is roughly ten times Epic’s entire 2025 total. Steam’s catalog of 117,000+ games dwarfs Epic’s curated 6,000+, and Valve’s 147 million monthly users comfortably outnumber Epic’s 78 million. Epic’s structural advantage is on price: a flat 12% commission (0% on a title’s first $1 million in revenue per year, a policy in place since 2019) against Steam’s tiered 30/25/20% commission. That pricing pitch has kept Epic relevant and driven real developer adoption, but it hasn’t dented Steam’s revenue lead in absolute dollar terms – if anything, per Alinea’s numbers, that gap widened again in H1 2026.
| Metric | Steam | Epic Games Store |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $11.1B (H1 2026 alone) | $1.16B (full-year 2025) |
| Monthly active users | 147M | 78M (Dec 2025 record) |
| Catalog size | 117,000+ games | 6,000+ games |
| Standard commission | 30%, tiered down to 20% above $50M | 12% flat (0% on first $1M/title/yr) |
| 3rd-party dev spend (2025) | Not broken out separately | $400M (+57% YoY) |
The Math Behind Valve’s Cut: Why 70/30 Still Rules
Steam’s commission structure hasn’t changed since October 2018: developers keep 70% of revenue up to $10 million per title, 75% between $10-50 million, and 80% above $50 million. Valve’s own 2025 year-in-review put the blended average across all non-Valve games at 76% paid to developers – meaning Valve’s effective average cut, once bigger sellers reach the lower tiers, runs closer to 24% than the headline 30%.
That structure is central to why Steam’s revenue dominance persists even though Epic undercuts it on paper. The simplified model below shows what a developer actually takes home on each platform at different revenue levels, using each platform’s real published commission tiers:
def take_home(gross_revenue):
# Steam: tiered commission, unchanged since Oct 2018
if gross_revenue <= 10_000_000:
steam = gross_revenue * 0.70
elif gross_revenue <= 50_000_000:
steam = 10_000_000 * 0.70 + (gross_revenue - 10_000_000) * 0.75
else:
steam = (10_000_000 * 0.70 + 40_000_000 * 0.75
+ (gross_revenue - 50_000_000) * 0.80)
# Epic Games Store: flat 12%, 0% on first $1M/year/title
epic = (min(gross_revenue, 1_000_000) * 1.00
+ max(0, gross_revenue - 1_000_000) * 0.88)
return steam, epic
for revenue in [1_000_000, 10_000_000, 50_000_000, 200_000_000]:
steam_payout, epic_payout = take_home(revenue)
print(f"${revenue:,} gross -> Steam pays ${steam_payout:,.0f}, "
f"Epic pays ${epic_payout:,.0f}")Run those numbers and Epic’s terms look better for the developer at every tier – exactly the tension critics raise in the antitrust litigation described below. Publishers stay on Steam anyway, because a game typically generates far more total revenue there than it would on Epic, even after the larger cut. Steam’s estimated 74-75% share of PC digital distribution, per analysis from law firm Cohen Milstein and the University of Glasgow’s CREATe research center, means most PC players simply aren’t shopping anywhere else.
Record Revenue, Live Antitrust Trial: The Awkward Timing
Steam’s record first half lands in the middle of active federal litigation over the very commission structure driving that revenue. In re Valve Antitrust Litigation (W.D. Wash., case No. 2:21-cv-00563), originally filed by indie studio Wolfire Games in 2021, cleared a major hurdle in November 2024 when a federal judge certified a class of roughly 32,000 developers and publishers who paid Valve commissions since January 2017. In late March 2026, the same judge denied Valve’s motion for summary judgment, sending both the developer claims and a parallel consumer class toward a jury trial with no date yet set.
The core allegation is that Valve’s “Platform Most Favored Nation” policy discourages publishers from offering better prices on rival stores, effectively setting a market-wide price floor on top of the 30% commission. Plaintiffs’ economist estimates a competitive commission would run 17-18% rather than 30%, putting the developer class’s alleged overcharge above $3.1 billion – and the Clayton Act allows successful private antitrust plaintiffs to recover treble damages, which would put a worst-case Valve exposure north of $9 billion. Parallel cases are underway in the UK (a Competition Appeal Tribunal claim covering up to 14 million consumers, provisionally valued at £656 million) and the Netherlands (a €220 million pre-litigation claim filed in June 2026).
None of that slows Steam’s growth in the meantime – H1 2026’s numbers suggest the marketplace’s dominance, and the commission revenue plaintiffs are challenging, is if anything accelerating. Whichever way a jury eventually rules, both sides will likely point to the $11.1 billion figure: plaintiffs as evidence of a durable monopoly extracting outsized rents, Valve as evidence of a competitive, growing marketplace that publishers and players choose voluntarily.
Valve’s Own Numbers: Engagement Behind the Revenue
Unlike the revenue figures, which come from third-party analysts, Steam’s engagement statistics come directly from Valve. At its GDC 2026 “State of Steam” presentation, Valve disclosed 147 million monthly active users and roughly 69 million daily active users – a DAU/MAU ratio near 47%, healthy for any consumer platform. Steam set an all-time concurrent-user record of 42,042,778 on January 11, 2026, notable because no single game launch drove it; it was organic weekday traffic. That record didn’t last long: Steam broke its own peak again on March 22, 2026, reaching 42,318,602 concurrent users.
Average weekly playtime per user rose from 6.3 hours in 2024 to 7.1 hours in 2025, and more than half of active users now play on two or more devices, reflecting Steam’s expanding presence on Steam Deck and other handhelds. Valve also disclosed that 5,863 individual games each earned more than $100,000 in 2025 – the best result in the platform’s history – and that 66% of Steam’s user base now browses the store in a language other than English, underlining how much of Steam’s growth is happening outside its original US and European base.
Market Impact: What It Means for Publishers and Developers
For publishers, the clearest signal in Alinea’s report is that catalog depth now matters more than launch-week execution. A publisher sitting on a deep back catalog – sequels, remasters, long-running live-service titles – is capturing a growing share of Steam spending almost passively, through sales events and algorithmic discovery, without a single new marketing push. That’s good news for larger, established publishers and tougher news for smaller studios betting everything on one new release cutting through an increasingly crowded launch calendar; against 117,000+ competing titles, standing out in launch week only gets harder.
It’s also a signal about platform strategy. Alinea’s observation that publishers are quietly returning to Steam after experimenting with proprietary launchers is a meaningful data point in the long-running debate over whether publishers should build their own storefront. Not every publisher is thriving enough to run that experiment in the first place – Embracer Group’s split into two separate companies earlier this year is one example of a major publisher restructuring under financial pressure – and Steam’s continued dominance makes the case that, for most publishers, distribution is no longer where competitive advantage gets won.
Market Impact: What It Means for Steam’s Hardware Push
Record software revenue also underwrites Valve’s expanding hardware ambitions. Over the past year, Valve has shipped a Steam Deck refresh, launched the Steam Machine living-room PC, revived the Steam Controller, and previewed the Steam Frame VR headset – a hardware push that only makes sense if the underlying software marketplace is healthy enough to fund it. Valve is a private company that doesn’t need to satisfy quarterly shareholder expectations, but hardware manufacturing, subsidized pricing, and long development cycles all require cash, and Steam’s storefront is still by far Valve’s largest revenue source.
The connection also runs the other way. Steam’s engagement numbers show more than half of active users now play on multiple devices, a trend Valve’s hardware lineup is deliberately built to capture and reinforce. A player who owns a Steam Deck, occasionally plays on a Steam Machine, and keeps a wishlist active on desktop is more valuable to Valve’s back-catalog flywheel than a single-platform player – more surface area for sale notifications, more logged session time, more chances to convert a wishlist item during a seasonal discount.
Historical Context: From $5.5 Billion to $11.1 Billion in Nine Years
Steam’s H1 2026 haul is easiest to understand against its own trajectory. Alinea puts Steam’s full-year 2017 revenue at roughly $5.5 billion – meaning H1 2026 alone, in six months, generated about twice that entire year’s total. By 2020, pandemic-driven demand pushed the full-year figure to $7.2 billion; by 2021 it reached $11.4 billion, a number H1 2026 alone very nearly matched in half the time. GameDiscoverCo separately estimated Steam’s full 2025 revenue at approximately $16.9 billion – a different methodology than Alinea’s own tracking, so the two figures shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable or summed together.
Zoom out further and the story is one of remarkably consistent compounding: a marketplace that launched in 2003 as a mandatory update-delivery tool for Half-Life 2, survived repeated predictions of PC gaming’s decline, weathered the launch of well-funded rivals like Epic Games Store, GOG, and EA App, and has still posted a larger first half than almost any single full year from its first decade and a half of operation. That durability is exactly what plaintiffs in the ongoing antitrust litigation argue is the problem – and exactly what Valve will argue is simply what a well-run marketplace looks like.
5 Predictions for the Rest of 2026
- Full-year 2026 likely sets a new record. If H2 2026 tracks anywhere close to typical seasonal strength, Steam’s full-year total should land meaningfully above 2025’s roughly $16.9 billion estimate – based on the current growth trajectory, not any confirmed Valve guidance.
- Back-catalog share keeps climbing. With new-release share falling for three straight half-years (29% → 27% → 21%), expect H2 2026 or H1 2027 reporting to show new releases dip toward, or below, the 20% mark, absent a launch large enough to reverse the trend on its own.
- The antitrust trial becomes a bigger story than the revenue itself. As a trial date gets set for In re Valve Antitrust Litigation, expect both plaintiffs and Valve to lean on the H1 2026 numbers in their public framing – this record is now evidence in an active federal case, not just an industry headline.
- More publishers scale back proprietary launchers. If the “quiet return to Steam” trend Alinea documented continues, expect at least one more major publisher to publicly deprioritize or fold a first-party PC launcher in favor of Steam-first distribution.
- Epic Games Store keeps growing, but the dollar gap widens, not narrows. Epic’s MAU and third-party spend are both trending up, but on current growth rates a percentage gain on Epic’s roughly $1.16 billion base still adds up to a small fraction of what a similar percentage gain adds to Steam’s $11.1-billion-in-six-months base.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much revenue did Steam make in the first half of 2026?
Independent analytics firm Alinea Analytics estimates Steam generated $11.1 billion in gross revenue between January and June 2026, up 14.5% from the same period in 2025. Valve does not publish official financial results, so this figure – like all Steam revenue estimates – is a third-party analysis, not a confirmed company disclosure.
Does Valve publish official Steam sales figures?
No. Valve is privately held and does not release Steam’s revenue, profit, or detailed sales data. All revenue estimates, including those from Alinea Analytics and rival tracker GameDiscoverCo, are built from public sales signals and industry modeling, not company filings.
What percentage of Steam’s revenue comes from new games versus old games?
In H1 2026, games released before 2026 accounted for 79% of Steam’s revenue, while games released in 2026 itself accounted for just 21% – down from 27% in H1 2025 and 29% in H1 2024.
What was the best-selling new game on Steam in H1 2026?
Forza Horizon 6 led all new 2026 releases with an estimated $197.7 million in revenue from roughly 3.5 million copies sold, narrowly ahead of Resident Evil Requiem at $194.5 million.
How does Steam’s revenue compare to the Epic Games Store?
Steam’s H1 2026 revenue alone ($11.1 billion) was roughly ten times the Epic Games Store’s entire 2025 revenue ($1.16 billion), even though Epic charges a much lower 12% commission compared to Steam’s tiered 30/25/20% structure.
Why is Valve facing an antitrust lawsuit over Steam?
A certified class of roughly 32,000 developers and publishers alleges Valve’s pricing policies on Steam effectively set a market-wide price floor, letting Valve extract inflated commissions. A federal judge denied Valve’s motion for summary judgment in March 2026, sending the case toward a jury trial.
How many people use Steam every month?
Valve disclosed 147 million monthly active users and about 69 million daily active users at its GDC 2026 “State of Steam” presentation, along with an all-time concurrent-user record of 42,318,602, set March 22, 2026.
Is Steam’s 2026 revenue record likely to hold up for the rest of the year?
Based on Steam’s own history, the second half of a year typically outperforms the first thanks to winter sales events, so analysts generally expect full-year 2026 to exceed 2025’s total. That is a projection based on past patterns, not a confirmed figure.
Related Coverage
- Valve Steam Antitrust Trial: 32,000 Devs, $3.1B [2026]
- GOG vs Steam: 30-Day Refunds vs 2-Hour Limit [2026]
- Steam Machine Hits $1,049: 6x Steam Deck Power [2026]
- Steam Controller Returns: $99, Sold Out in 30 Min [2026]
- Resident Evil Requiem Hits 7M, Capcom Profit +13% [2026]
- Subnautica 2 Hits 5M Sales as $250M Bonus Suit Ends [2026]
- Embracer Group Splits in Two, Profit Craters 68% [2026]
For more platform news and market analysis, visit our gaming coverage hub.
