Valve claims over 5,000 Steam games earned more than $100,000 last year. Oh, and it'd really love some RAM

Steam's dominance as a gaming platform shows no sign of faltering, does it? In early January, it set a new concurrent user record, which is about as strong a start to a new year as you can hope for, and since then it's smashed it again with a peak of 42 million players. Sure, Valve has some headaches to contend with in 2026 too - component price rises and shortages are clearly having an effect on its lineup of new hardware, and it's got a few lawsuits floating around as well. However, it's still the go-to destination for most PC gamers. In a talk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Valve has now shared some interesting data behind how many games are finding success on Steam.

While PCGamesN was unable to attend Valve's March 10 talk at GDC, which featured the company's PR and communications guru Kaci Aitchison Boyle and business team member Tom Giardino, several people in the room have been posting some of the key takeaways online. These include GameDeveloper's reporter Chris Kerr, who shared an enlightening thread on BlueSky about what Valve had to say about the state of Steam and its hardware slate.

For me, the most intriguing point shared by Kerr is this: Valve claims that 5,863 games earned more than $100,000 in revenue in 2025. A slide from its presentation shows year-on-year growth in this regard, and Kerr summarizes this section of the talk by writing: "Valve says more titles are finding success on Steam than ever before, despite concerns of over-saturation on the storefront."

It appears that this statistic includes games that were released before 2025. For example, an immensely popular, ongoing multiplayer game like Counter-Strike 2 is probably rolled into that figure - I think I can say with confidence that it's making more than $100,000 a year from cases… However, there will be a lot of 2025's reported 19,000+ new Steam games in there too.

Valve also highlights an increase in users jumping on its Daily Deals scheme. A total of 1,500 games were featured as a daily deal, 69% of which had never taken part in these flash sales before. 8.2 million Steam users took advantage of a Daily Deal and snapped up a featured game last year, which Valve says is up 125% (presumably on the year before, but that's not made explicitly clear).

For a bit of a geography geek like me, there's also a fascinating world map displaying all of Steam's players, showing hotspots of activity and some incredibly remote users. It's giving big Call of Duty Black Ops multiplayer menu energy, for anyone else who remembers that.

Kerr also reports in his thread that, during the hardware section of the talk, Aitchison Boyle and Giardino jest about the current issues around component shortages. "Valve speakers joke there will be no hardware announcements at GDC 2026 'unless anybody has RAM,'" Kerr quotes.

Attendee Hayden Dingman also shares a similar quote: "If you have a line on a bunch of RAM, we are in the market and would like to buy it." However, it's worth noting that all of its slides still show the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller as coming in 2026, so there's been no further movement on launch windows, which is a relief. Still no word on price though… Why do I feel it's going to sting?

So, 2025 was a bumper year for Steam, and we know 2026 has already started strong, but with that injection of new hardware, plenty of big games, and absolutely certainly definitely Half-Life 3 (please, Valve) I wouldn't be surprised to see things climb even higher.