Steam is heading past $20 billion, and it's your old library paying for it

$19.9 billion. That's what Steam pulled in across all of 2025, according to Alinea Analytics, and after a record-breaking September the analytics firm reckons it's safe to say 2026 blows straight past the $20 billion line for the first time.

Honestly, that part was already baked in. Alinea had Steam at $15 billion through August, up about 15% on the same stretch last year, and the first half alone was a record $11.1 billion - 14.5% up year-on-year and even ahead of the second half of 2025, which is usually the stronger season thanks to holiday sales. You don't need a spreadsheet to see where that line ends up. A record September just puts a frame around it.

The number I actually care about is the split. In the first half, 2026 releases took roughly 21% of Steam's revenue. The same metric for 2025 releases in H1 2025 was 27%, and for 2024 releases in H1 2024 it was 29%. So the pie keeps getting bigger while the slice going to new games keeps getting thinner. The back catalogue is doing the heavy lifting.

And it's not because nothing is coming out. Alinea counts around 19,000 titles released between January and August - about a full year's worth of 2025 output in eight months. The biggest new earners, Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem and Crimson Desert, did roughly $200 million each in the first half. Great money, but no single launch is dominating the year. The top 100 new releases together made about $2.4 billion, under 16% of the platform's total, and more than half of that came from established franchises even though most of those 100 games were new IP.

If you play anything competitive, none of this should surprise you. Look at what's sitting at the top of the concurrent player charts on any given evening: games that are years old, live-service loops, skins, passes, the same maps we've been grinding since before some of this year's releases were announced. My own Steam playtime this year is embarrassingly concentrated in a handful of titles I bought ages ago. I'd bet yours looks similar.

That's the real story behind the $20 billion headline. Steam isn't growing because of a hit-driven release calendar - it's growing because people never leave the games they already own, and Valve takes its cut every time they spend inside them. For a new studio trying to break through 19,000 other launches, that's a brutal environment. For Valve it's about as close to a money printer as PC gaming gets.

So when the full-year number lands and everyone celebrates the record, remember who paid for it. Not the launch-day crowd. The guy on his 3,000th hour of the same shooter.

Image: Brian Wong / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gaming_PC-Setup_-_Astaroth-_The_Completed_System.jpg