[STEAM] Behold, "the whole history of Steam's economy in one picture": the top 1% of games earn 84.5% of estimated revenue, and most games barely make anything

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New analysis of 99,206 Steam games illustrates just how extreme the economics can be on Valve's PC gaming emporium, with a full half of paid games earning well under an estimated $4,000 while the upper crust gross anywhere from $15 million to several billion.

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comes from game discovery hub We Love It. Totally Human Media's Ichiro Lambe and Matt Martindale worked with VaporLens' Dr. Tim Ermilov to analyze 99,206 paid games, estimate their earnings, and plot genre data. Lambe notably worked at Valve from 2018 to 2020, and he "co-created Steam Labs at Valve to improve game discovery and recommendation," per his

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profile.

Their analysis comes with the usual Steam research caveat: Valve doesn't publish revenue figures, so they're instead reverse-engineered using user reviews as a base that's then multiplied to estimate sales.

This report also only looks at premium games, meaning free-to-play giants like Valve's Counter-Strike are left out, as are "non-game software, adult-only titles and unreleased entries." The list of 99,206 was selected from a base of 136,281.

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(Image credit: Rockstar Games) The standard multiplier here is 35, so this research assumes one Steam review is worth 35 sales at a game's current listed price, though you can also use a more "conservative" 20 or "generous" 50 in the report's impressive graphs. This ratio is not constant across games in real life, and Steam games always sell more when discounted (

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), so do not take this as gospel.

Despite extremely soft estimates, especially for massive games where one percentage point is worth more money than I'll ever see, the aggregated trends here are still useful and interesting. Many estimates also align with publicly available financial reports as well as other analyst research.

"Half of all paid games on Steam have earned less than an estimated $3,622 in their entire lifetime," the report reads. "A game at the 90th percentile has earned about $236,184, and the 99th percentile starts at $15,872,031."

A scatter plot of game revenue puts this into perspective: a storm of green at the bottom, and a sparse constellation of hits at the top. Around or above the $100 million revenue mark, Half-Life 2, Vampire Survivors, Terraria, Among Us, Stardew Valley, Valheim, Schedule 1, Palworld, and Baldur's Gate 3 shine like stars. At the very top rests our sun: GTA 5. (What's

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, then? A ****** hole? A supernova?)

"On a linear scale the same chart is a flat line and about two hundred visible dots, which is the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture," the report adds.

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(Image credit: Team Cherry) A full 8,024 paid games analyzed don't have any reviews at all. Last year, Steam data sleuth Gamalytic estimated that over 5,000 games released in 2025 alone

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to cover the $100 Steam listing fee.

Arguably more striking is the rate of Steam's growth. "Steam's catalogue grew faster than its revenue," the report says, and this has seen those earning extremes widen. A massive 19,714 games were released on Steam in 2024, and 2025 passed even that at 23,107.

Go back just five years and Steam looks very different with 7,427 games released in 2018 – more than even 2019, and the highest on record at the time. 2026 has already doubled that at 15,814 games released, and the year still has several busy months ahead of it.

Steam's revenue, and Valve's earnings, have exploded in the same way. Last month, Alinea Analytics reported that

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than in the entirety of 2020. PC gaming is notably the platform

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in many regions, here in this mature gaming market and cost-of-living crisis.

The extrapolated genre math is also fascinating. Sandbox games have exploded on Steam in recent years, this report finds, and are now the most reliably bankable genre on the whole platform, with both the highest median and top decile revenue. In 2026, sandbox also ranks highest in "crowding vs. payoff," beating out much larger genres in estimated revenue per game.

Other top genres, ranked by estimated revenue, include:

• Visual novel
• Simulation
• RPG
• Horror
• Psychological horror
• Point & Click
• Sports (notably, heavily affected by microtransaction revenue)
• FPS (similar to sports, and also skewed by absent F2P giants like Counter-Strike)

The worst-performing genres on Steam are 3D and 2D platformers, according to this report, and data showing "when each genre peaked" suggests they've only struggled more in recent years. The action and adventure genres are so broad and popular that they've been giants for years, but simulation and strategy games are seemingly gaining on them in terms of new games released.

Obviously, this genre math is also a little opaque. Would a hit like Hollow Knight: Silksong go in 2D platformers, or, with no Metroidvania tag, the broad "Exploration" or "Action" tags? "A game counts towards a genre only when the tag is one of its six most popular tags," the report explains.

This may be the most comprehensive, best-presented report I've seen for this side of Steam, and it really underscores an old adage of the internet age: for every breakout success story, there's surely hundreds or thousands failures.

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