Valve just posted the best six months in Steam’s 23-year history — and the momentum hasn’t let up since. Games-analytics firm Alinea Analytics estimates that Steam generated $11.1 billion in gross revenue during the first half of 2026, up 14.5% year-over-year and 8% higher than the historically stronger holiday half of late 2025. PC Gamer broke the estimate down first in mid-July, and GamesRadar followed with its own read on the numbers days later. September 2026 pushed the number higher still: Alinea pegged that month alone at roughly $1.7 billion, up 13% year-over-year, lifting Steam’s nine-month total to about $16.5 billion for January through September 2026, compared with $14.5 billion over the same stretch in 2025, and putting the platform on pace to clear $20 billion for the full year, according to Alinea Analytics figures reported in October 2026. Alinea also reported Steam’s Q3 2026 revenue at $5.5 billion, up 12% year over year.
The timing stands out. Overall US video game spending fell 21% in June, and Valve is simultaneously defending Steam’s 30% commission structure in a federal antitrust case that could reshape how PC games get sold. Here’s what the number means, where the growth is coming from, and what happens next.
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Steam’s Record First Half, by the Numbers
The $11.1 billion figure covers January through June 2026 only, and Alinea paired it with another notable data point: Steam crossed roughly 200 million monthly active users over that same stretch, according to a July 2026 gHacks report citing the firm, while Valve itself said at GDC 2026 that Steam hit 42,042,778 concurrent users in January 2026. The half-year revenue figure doesn’t include whatever Steam earns in the second half of the year, historically the stronger period thanks to seasonal sales, and it already hasn’t — Alinea’s running year-to-date estimate had climbed to roughly $16.5 billion for January through September 2026, up from $14.5 billion over the same months in 2025. That makes the year-over-year comparison the more telling one: Alinea Analytics, as reported by Tech Insider in August 2026, put Steam’s H1 2026 growth at 14.5% year-over-year and said the period ran 8% higher than Steam’s second half of 2025. Working backward from that growth rate implies Steam’s first half of 2025 generated roughly $9.7 billion, though Alinea has not published that H1 2025 figure directly.
Valve does not publish official Steam financial statements, so every figure in this story is a modeled estimate from Alinea Analytics, not a company filing. Alinea says its model tracks individual game sales and checks them against numbers publishers occasionally announce themselves, and $11.1 billion is its central estimate for the six-month period.
For scale, Newzoo pegged the entire global PC games market at $39.9 billion for all of 2025. Steam’s first half of 2026 alone equaled more than a quarter of that full-year total, and by September 2026 its roughly $15 billion year-to-date haul had grown to more than a third of it, even though the two figures span different periods and Newzoo’s number covers PC gaming beyond just Steam. Hitmarker’s July 2026 coverage of Alinea’s numbers made the point another way, noting that the $11.1 billion first-half figure alone had already topped Steam’s entire full-year 2020 revenue.
Alinea also flagged an unusual pattern inside the number. Games released in 2026 accounted for just 21% of Steam’s first-half revenue, down from 27% in the first half of 2025 and 29% in the first half of 2024. Steam’s growth is increasingly coming from its back catalog, not from new releases, a trend the next section breaks down in more detail.
Who Is Alinea Analytics, and How Reliable Is the Estimate?
Alinea Analytics is an independent games-data firm that models storefront revenue with its own sales-tracking platform, then compares its estimates against the actual numbers publishers occasionally disclose. The firm markets that transparency as its main selling point, stating it displays estimates next to publisher-announced actuals so outsiders can judge accuracy for themselves rather than taking the numbers on faith.
The named analyst behind the Steam figure is Rhys Elliott, Alinea’s head of market analysis. Elliott published a 2026 mid-year report plus an earlier 2025 year-in-review covering January 1 through November 20 of that year, which found that Steam games had already generated $16.2 billion in revenue by that point, with more than $4 billion flowing to Valve directly. As early as November 2025, pepelac.news cited Alinea’s data suggesting full-year 2025 Steam sales could exceed $17 billion, and by July 2026 TweakTown was citing Alinea’s growth curve for a full-year 2025 tally closer to $20 billion, a reminder that even Alinea’s own estimates kept climbing as more of the year’s sales data came in.
This number is a third-party estimate built from a sales-tracking model, not an audited financial disclosure. Valve has never confirmed Steam’s revenue publicly, and the company does not break out Steam-specific numbers the way a public company would in a quarterly filing. That does not make Alinea’s estimate unreliable, but it does mean the $11.1 billion figure should be read as an informed estimate rather than a confirmed Valve statement. It also describes gross revenue generated through Steam, not money received by Valve, and a separate September 2026 report reportedly cited Video Game Insights at $5.36 billion for H1 2026, a conflicting estimate that shows how far third-party models can disagree.
What’s Fueling Steam’s 2026 Growth Spurt
Alinea’s report points to a handful of overlapping drivers rather than one single cause. Several high-priced AAA launches landed on Steam in the first half of 2026, many carrying the now-common $70 price point for major PC releases, and those launches sold well enough to lift the whole period. At the same time, older games kept selling at a level that outpaced new releases, a distinct trend covered in the next section.
Regional growth also played a role. Alinea’s commentary specifically calls out an influx of players from Asia, and China in particular, as a factor behind the first-half surge. That lines up with a pattern the games industry has tracked for several years: PC gaming has grown fastest outside North America and Western Europe, and Steam remains the default storefront in most of those markets because no regional rival matches its catalog size.
The third driver is less about players and more about publishers. Alinea’s write-up notes that some publishers who had experimented with their own launchers or exclusive storefront deals came back to Steam during this period, a meaningful admission for an industry that spent much of the previous decade trying to build alternatives to Valve’s 30% cut. Publishers returning suggests that bet often doesn’t pay off, and it helps explain why Steam’s numbers keep climbing even as rivals spend heavily on exclusives and free games.
The Back-Catalog Boom: Why Old Games Keep Outselling New Releases
The clearest structural story in Steam’s 2026 numbers is the shrinking share of revenue coming from new releases. Alinea’s data shows that games released in the same half-year they launched accounted for just 21% of Steam’s first-half 2026 revenue. That’s down from 27% in the first half of 2025 and 29% in the first half of 2024, meaning the back catalog’s share climbed from 71% to 79% in roughly two years.
Part of that shift is simple math. Steam’s library keeps growing every year, so more older games compete for the same wallet share, and a bigger catalog naturally pulls more revenue toward titles that aren’t brand new. But it also reflects how players actually shop on Steam. Seasonal sales, franchise bundles, and algorithmic recommendations all push players toward titles that already have a reputation and a stack of reviews, rather than untested new releases at full price.
Alinea’s broader 2025 data backs this up from a different angle. Premium, one-time-purchase games made up 78% of total Steam revenue for the period it studied, while free-to-play titles have not cracked 20% of Steam revenue in any of the past ten years. Combined with the back-catalog trend, the picture is a storefront where a relatively small number of aging, paid, premium titles do a disproportionate amount of the earning, year after year. Here’s how that revenue mix has shifted across the last three comparable half-years:
| Half-Year | New-Release Revenue Share | Back-Catalog Revenue Share | Estimated Steam Gross Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| H1 2024 | 29% | 71% | Not disclosed by Alinea |
| H1 2025 | 27% | 73% | ~$9.7B (implied by reported growth rate) |
| H2 2025 | Not broken out | Not broken out | ~$10.3B (implied by reported growth rate) |
| H1 2026 | 21% | 79% | $11.1B (record half-year) |
The percentages above come directly from Alinea Analytics. The H1 2025 and H2 2025 dollar figures are not numbers Alinea published on their own; they’re derived by working backward from the 14.5% year-over-year growth rate and 8% half-over-half increase that Alinea reported for H1 2026, as detailed in Tech Insider’s August 2026 coverage of the firm’s figures.
China’s Steam Surge: Asia’s Growing Share of PC Gaming
Alinea’s explanation for H1 2026’s growth specifically names an influx of Asian players, with China singled out, as one of the drivers behind the jump. Valve doesn’t publish country-by-country revenue splits, so there’s no official percentage to cite, but the direction fits what regional analysts have already been tracking for years.
China’s PC gaming audience has been a growth target for Western publishers for years, complicated by approval requirements for games sold domestically and by the popularity of local platforms. Steam has managed to stay accessible to Chinese players even without a fully localized presence, and past industry reporting has repeatedly flagged China as a large source of Steam’s concurrent-player counts during major sales events and single-player launches.
If Asian user growth keeps compounding the way Alinea’s report suggests, it changes the calculus for publishers deciding where to launch first and how to price regionally. A storefront growing fastest outside its original US and European base is one where regional pricing, localization, and payment support start to matter as much as the games themselves. That’s a very different Steam than the one that launched in 2003 as a tool for Valve to patch its own games automatically over the internet.
Inside Valve’s Cut: Steam’s Commission Structure Explained
Steam’s headline number matters to Valve specifically because of how much of it Valve keeps. Steam’s standard commission is 30% of a sale, a rate that has applied to most transactions since the storefront opened to third-party publishers. Valve’s published policy lowers that rate for bigger sellers, dropping once a title crosses $10 million in lifetime Steam sales and dropping again at a higher threshold, though the base 30% still applies to the large majority of games and revenue on the platform.
That structure is why Valve’s own take has historically run into the billions even in a partial year. Alinea’s 2025 year-in-review, covering January 1 through November 20 of that year, put total game revenue on Steam at $16.2 billion for that stretch, of which more than $4 billion went to Valve after publishers and developers took their share, a figure Game World Observer cited as of November 2025. SQMagazine’s January 2026 update on those numbers calculated that $16.2 billion tally as roughly a 50% jump from Steam’s full-year 2024 revenue of $10.8 billion. Applying a similar ratio to the $11.1 billion first-half 2026 figure suggests Valve’s own cut for the period likely landed in the billions as well, though Alinea has not published a first-half 2026 figure specifically for Valve’s share.
The commission is also the single most contested part of Steam’s business. It’s the same 30% rate that Epic Games has spent years trying to undercut with its own 12% storefront fee, and it’s the specific rate at the center of a federal antitrust case that has been working through the courts since 2021.
The Wolfire Games Lawsuit: A Legal Cloud Over Steam’s Business Model
Steam’s commission structure is also the subject of a federal antitrust case that has been in litigation for more than four years. Wolfire Games, the studio behind Overgrowth, sued Valve in April 2021, arguing that Steam’s dominance of PC game distribution lets Valve charge an inflated commission and enforce price-parity rules that stop publishers from selling the same game cheaper elsewhere.
The case has had a winding path through the courts. A judge dismissed Wolfire’s initial complaint without prejudice in November 2021, giving the studio a chance to file an amended version. That amended case survived Valve’s next attempt to have it thrown out, and in November 2024, US District Judge Jamal N. Whitehead granted class certification, turning the case into a class action representing roughly 32,000 game developers and publishers who sold titles on Steam.
By January 2026, reporting on the case pointed to potential damages provisionally estimated at up to £656 million, or roughly $897.7 million, in a separate UK consumer lawsuit against Valve (brought by Vicki Shotbolt on behalf of up to 14 million UK consumers) — not the Wolfire developer/publisher case. That figure could grow if the case reaches trial and damages are multiplied under US antitrust law, which allows treble damages in successful claims, though no court has awarded or confirmed that outcome. For Steam’s record 2026 revenue, the lawsuit is a reminder that the same commission generating Valve’s earnings is under direct legal challenge.
| Date | Development |
|---|---|
| April 2021 | Wolfire Games and co-plaintiffs file antitrust suit against Valve over Steam’s commission and price-parity rules |
| November 2021 | Judge dismisses the initial complaint without prejudice, with leave to amend |
| May 2022 | Judge allows part of the amended case to move forward |
| November 25, 2024 | Judge Jamal N. Whitehead certifies a class of roughly 32,000 developers and publishers |
| January 2026 | Reports put potential damages in a separate UK consumer lawsuit at up to $897.7 million; this figure is not from the Wolfire developer/publisher case |
Steam vs. Epic vs. PlayStation vs. Xbox: The Competitive Landscape
Steam’s record half puts fresh numbers on a competitive gap that has been widening for years. Epic Games Store, Valve’s most direct PC storefront rival, generated $1.16 billion in total revenue for all of 2025. That was up 6% from $1.09 billion in 2024 and 22% from $950 million in 2023, and Epic built that revenue with a storefront fee of just 12%, less than half of Steam’s standard 30% cut, plus a run of free weekly games meant to build its user base, which had grown to roughly 78 million users.
The gap in scale is still enormous. Steam generated more in six months of 2026 than Epic Games Store generated in the entirety of 2025, nearly ten times as much, while charging more than double Epic’s commission rate. That’s the core tension in the PC storefront market. Epic has spent years undercutting Steam on price and funding exclusives to pull users away, and Epic Games Store brought in new leadership to try to close the gap, yet Valve’s revenue keeps growing anyway.
Console storefronts operate under different rules, since PlayStation and Xbox both tie their digital stores to their own hardware. Microsoft’s Xbox business, which combines hardware, subscriptions, and content sales, reported revenue of $21.8 billion even as unit-level metrics softened, while Sony’s PlayStation ecosystem has grown past 125 million users even as PS5 hardware sales cooled. Neither company breaks out storefront-only digital revenue in a way that allows a direct apples-to-apples comparison with Steam, and GOG, the DRM-free storefront owned by CD Projekt, does not publish revenue figures at all.
What the comparison does show clearly is that Steam is playing a different game than its rivals. Epic competes on commission rate and exclusives. PlayStation and Xbox compete by locking players into hardware ecosystems. Steam competes on catalog size, price flexibility during sales, and simple inertia, since it remains the default place PC gamers already have accounts, wishlists, and libraries built up over years.
| Platform | Latest Reported Figure | Period | Standard Commission | Business Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam (Valve) | $11.1B gross revenue | H1 2026 | 30%, lower above $10M in sales | Open PC storefront, no hardware lock-in |
| Epic Games Store | $1.16B total revenue | Full-year 2025 | 12% | PC and mobile, funded partly by exclusivity deals |
| Xbox (Microsoft) | $21.8B total revenue | Reported 2026 | Not broken out separately | Hardware, Game Pass subscriptions, and content combined |
| PlayStation (Sony) | 125M+ user base | 2026 | Not publicly disclosed | Console-locked storefront |
| GOG (CD Projekt) | Not publicly disclosed | N/A | Not publicly disclosed | DRM-free PC storefront, niche positioning |
Historical Context: How Steam Got Here
Steam launched in 2003 as a way for Valve to patch its own games automatically over the internet, a mundane utility with no obvious ambition to become a retail platform. Valve opened it to outside publishers a couple of years later, and by the mid-2010s Steam had become the default place PC gamers bought games, largely because no rival offered a comparable catalog, community features, and regular sales.
That dominance is exactly what drew antitrust scrutiny in the first place. Wolfire’s 2021 lawsuit argued that Steam’s market position, not just its commission rate, is what lets Valve charge 30% without losing business to competitors. Epic’s launcher, built around a much lower commission, was designed to test that theory. It has grown into a billion-dollar-a-year business in its own right, yet it hasn’t come close to displacing Steam.
The 2026 numbers suggest that gap may be widening rather than closing. A storefront generating $16.2 billion across roughly eleven months of 2025, then $11.1 billion in just the first six months of 2026, is not a platform losing ground to competitors charging lower fees. If anything, the return of publishers who had tried alternative storefronts, a detail Alinea specifically flagged in its 2026 report, suggests Steam’s scale advantage has become more entrenched over the past few years, not less.
Market Impact: What Record Revenue Means for Developers and Publishers
For individual developers, Steam’s growth is a mixed signal. The platform generating more revenue overall is good news in the abstract, but the back-catalog data suggests that growth is concentrating around already-successful, older titles rather than lifting all new releases equally. A new-release revenue share of just 21% in H1 2026, down from 29% two years earlier, means a growing share of Steam’s wallet is going to games that already have an audience, reviews, and a sale-price history.
That makes organic visibility for new releases harder to earn, even as the overall market grows. Developers launching a new game on Steam in 2026 compete not just against other new releases but against a deepening back catalog that absorbs a bigger share of player spending every year. It’s part of why wishlisting, Next Fest demos, and early access have become close to mandatory steps for PC developers building momentum before launch, rather than optional extras.
For publishers weighing where to sell, the numbers make a practical argument that’s hard to ignore. Even at a 30% commission, twice Epic’s rate, Steam’s traffic and existing user base appear to generate enough additional revenue that publishers who tried alternatives are coming back. Unless the Wolfire case forces a structural change to that commission, or a rival storefront finds a way to match Steam’s catalog depth, the economics currently favor staying on Steam even for publishers unhappy with the rate they pay.
Handhelds and Steam’s Widening Footprint
Steam’s revenue growth isn’t just about the traditional desktop and laptop storefront anymore. Valve has spent the past few years pushing into hardware, from the Steam Deck handheld to the more traditional Steam Machine, on the idea that Steam the storefront and Steam the platform can extend into rooms and form factors beyond a desk. That hardware push matters here because every device running Steam still funnels purchases back through the same 30% storefront that produced this year’s record numbers.
Hardware sales alone can’t explain an eight-figure jump in half-year revenue, and Alinea’s report doesn’t credit hardware specifically as a growth driver. But the broader strategy reinforces why Steam’s dominance keeps proving durable. Every new handheld or living-room device that runs Steam gives a player one more reason to keep their library and wishlist inside Valve’s ecosystem instead of switching storefronts.
Five Predictions for Steam’s Second Half and Beyond
Based on the trends in this report, here are five reasonable expectations for the rest of 2026 and beyond. These are informed projections, not confirmed outcomes.
- H2 2026 likely sets a new full-year record. Steam’s second half has historically outperformed its first half thanks to autumn and winter sales. If that seasonal pattern holds even loosely, Steam looks set to clear the full-year total Alinea Analytics itself projected in October 2026, more than $20 billion for 2026, putting Steam on track for its biggest calendar year yet.
- The back-catalog share of revenue keeps climbing. With new releases already down to 21% of first-half revenue, expect that number to fall further rather than rebound, as Steam’s library keeps growing every year and sales events keep rewarding titles with an established track record.
- The Wolfire case becomes a bigger story regardless of outcome. Whether Valve settles, wins, or loses at trial, a case representing roughly 32,000 developers and touching Steam’s core commission structure is likely to draw more mainstream coverage as it nears resolution, especially if damages estimates keep climbing from the $897.7 million figure reported in January.
- Rival storefronts keep struggling to convert lower fees into market share. Epic’s 12% commission hasn’t stopped Steam from growing faster in percentage terms, and nothing in this data suggests that dynamic reverses soon. Expect continued pressure on Epic, PlayStation, and Xbox to compete on exclusives, subscriptions, or bundling rather than fees alone.
- Regional growth, especially from Asia, becomes a bigger part of Steam’s story. If the player growth Alinea flagged in China and elsewhere in Asia continues, expect more localized pricing, payment options, and marketing aimed at those markets, both from Valve and from publishers chasing the same audience.
What It Means for Everyday PC Gamers
Most players won’t notice Steam’s revenue record directly, but the underlying trends already shape the day-to-day experience of buying games on PC. The back-catalog effect helps explain why Steam’s sales events keep expanding and why older games keep getting deeper discounts. Valve and publishers both benefit when a five-year-old game finds a new wave of buyers during a seasonal sale, and the data shows that strategy working better than ever.
It also means the case for switching away from Steam keeps getting weaker, even for players annoyed by specific Valve decisions, like the end of physical Steam gift cards earlier this year. A storefront growing this fast, with this much of the industry’s catalog built in, is hard to walk away from even when a specific policy change is unpopular.
The Wolfire lawsuit is the one thread that could change that calculus for players directly. If the case eventually forces Valve to lower its commission or loosen price-parity rules, publishers could pass some of that savings to buyers, or at least stop being penalized for offering deals elsewhere. That outcome is still years away at best, but it’s the clearest path toward a meaningfully different Steam than the one that just posted a record half-year.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much revenue did Steam make in the first half of 2026?
Games-analytics firm Alinea Analytics estimates Steam generated $11.1 billion in gross revenue between January and June 2026. That’s up 14.5% from the same period in 2025 and 8% higher than the second half of 2025, making it the platform’s best half-year on record according to Alinea. By September 2026 alone, Alinea pegged the month at roughly $1.7 billion, up 13% year-over-year, lifting Steam’s year-to-date total to about $16.5 billion for January through September 2026, compared with $14.5 billion over the same period in 2025, per the firm’s October 2026 figures.
Is the $11.1 billion Steam revenue figure official?
No. Valve does not publish official Steam financial statements, so the $11.1 billion figure is a third-party estimate from Alinea Analytics, built from the firm’s own sales-tracking model rather than a confirmed company disclosure.
How much commission does Valve take from Steam sales?
Valve’s standard commission is 30% of a sale, a rate that has applied since Steam opened to third-party publishers. The rate decreases for individual titles once they cross $10 million in lifetime Steam sales, though 30% still applies to the large majority of games on the platform.
What is the Wolfire Games lawsuit against Valve about?
Wolfire Games sued Valve in April 2021, arguing that Steam’s market dominance lets Valve charge an inflated 30% commission and enforce price-parity rules that block publishers from selling games cheaper elsewhere. The case was certified as a class action in November 2024, covering roughly 32,000 developers, and remains active.
How does Steam’s revenue compare to the Epic Games Store?
Epic Games Store generated $1.16 billion in total revenue for all of 2025. Steam’s first half of 2026 alone, at $11.1 billion, is nearly ten times that full-year Epic figure, despite Epic charging a 12% commission compared with Steam’s 30%.
Why is Steam’s back catalog outselling new releases?
Alinea’s data shows new releases made up only 21% of Steam’s first-half 2026 revenue, down from 29% two years earlier. A growing library, deep seasonal discounts, and player habits that favor proven titles with an established review history all push spending toward older games rather than new launches.
Is China a big part of Steam’s growth?
Alinea specifically cited an influx of players from Asia, particularly China, as one driver behind Steam’s first-half 2026 growth. Valve does not publish country-level revenue splits, so there is no official percentage, but the trend matches broader industry reporting on PC gaming’s growth outside North America and Europe.
What could change Steam’s commission structure going forward?
The clearest path is the Wolfire Games antitrust case. If Valve loses at trial or settles on terms that require a lower standard commission or looser price-parity rules, it could reshape the economics behind Steam’s revenue for both Valve and the publishers who sell through it.
