Steam’s sales numbers aren’t telling the whole story

On Tuesday, PC giant Valve broke down the state of Steam for an eager audience at the 2026 Game Developers Conference. As Valve told it, things have never been better for Steam. User growth is exponential, game releases are up, and developers have way more tools to help them bring their games to new audiences. Alongside this torrent of good news, Valve proudly displayed a graph with encouraging numbers — or so it seemed.

According to the graph, the publisher saw nearly 6,000 games earn at least $100,000 on the platform in 2025, a 30% increase over the five years between 2020 and 2025. Valve presented this data to dispel the narrative that Steam has too many games flooding its storefront. When a single year sees 19,000 new releases, developers are understandably anxious about the visibility of their games. Is everyone making games fighting for an increasingly small piece of the pie?

Valve insists that isn’t the case. “We’ve been able to make the pie substantially bigger,” Steam’s Tom Giardino told the audience at GDC.

But as No More Robots founder Mike Rose recently pointed out on Bluesky, the situation is not so cut and dry. Rose correctly notes that the 6,000 games could include older titles. Viewed from that perspective, the data offers a far less optimistic view of the Steam landscape.

That figure also does not take into account things like taxes or Valve’s own cut of the proceeds, Rose says. The publishing company founder posited that a figure like $50,000 is probably a more accurate estimate. And when you consider that most games are made by teams of multiple people, that $50,000 doesn’t go very far.

“How many multi-person studios do you know that could survive after making $50k from their game launch? Not many!!” said Rose.

Speaking to Polygon via email, Rose acknowledged that Valve is one of the few platforms that consistently helps small developers with discoverability. The storefront rolls out new features for users and developers every few weeks. But as far as Rose is concerned, Valve’s graph and framing obfuscate the real problem at hand.

“What I’m essentially saying is that anyone in the business of selling video games knows that the last few years have been unbelievably rough, and we’re in a horrible downward industry spiral across all platforms,” Rose tells Polygon. Just this November, game sales data revealed that the industry had its worst month in nearly 20 years — and it came during a period that has historically seen strong sales.

“But what has irked me here, is that they also continuously love to make out publicly like everything is *absolutely fantastic*, no problems here at all, while the industry burns down,” Rose says. “It feels so disingenuous, and also just comes across as ‘well, *we* are making more money, therefore the industry is fine.'”

To Valve’s credit, the company does not have investors and does not sell ad placements, as other storefronts do. The GDC panelists repeatedly said that the company feels most beholden to its users and developers, and that Valve’s success has a direct correlation with their happiness.

“That means we’re freed up to make decisions based exactly on what your happiness is looking like,” Valve’s communications specialist Kaci Aitchison told the crowd at GDC. “If you tell us you’re not happy, we’re gonna work to try and fix that.”