$11.1B in Six Months, and Steam Is Still Accelerating

Forget the holiday rush. Steam's biggest six months ever didn't happen in the back half of the year, when seasonal sales and Christmas gift cards usually push revenue to its peak. It happened in the first half of 2026.

According to a report from Alinea Analytics, games on Steam generated an estimated $11.1 billion in gross revenue between January and June 2026. As reported by Tom's Hardware, that figure is up 14.5% compared to the same period last year. More striking is the comparison to H2 2025: the first half of this year beat the holiday-heavy second half by 8%. Rhys Elliott, Alinea's head of market analysis, called that "the more remarkable comparison given the back half of the year usually wins on seasonal sales and holiday buys."

Steam's trajectory over the past decade makes the number look less like a spike and more like a trend that refuses to flatten. The platform's yearly revenue has climbed from $5.5 billion in 2017 to roughly $20 billion in 2025. If H1 2026 is any indication, this year will blow past that. I've covered a lot of "record quarter" and "record year" stories in this industry, and most of them come with caveats about one blockbuster title skewing the data. This isn't that. The growth here is structural.

Where the money is coming from

Several forces are stacking on top of each other. A surge of Chinese players, over 90% of whom game on PC, has expanded Steam's addressable market. Game prices have crept upward across the board. Publishers like Ubisoft have returned to Steam after failed experiments with their own launchers. And viral indie hits continue to punch above their weight: Meccha Chameleon shipped over 15 million copies within weeks of its June launch.

Then there's the back catalogue effect, and this one I find particularly interesting. Only 21% of Steam's 2026 revenue has come from games released this year. In 2024, that figure was 29%. Players are spending more money on older titles, fuelled by deep discounts during publisher sales and, frankly, a growing sense that many legacy games are better than what's shipping now at $70-80. Valve doesn't have to lift a finger; it just collects a cut on every transaction, whether the game came out last month or last decade.

The top five new releases by gross revenue on Steam in 2026 tell their own story: Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert, Slay the Spire 2, and Subnautica 2, with Meccha Chameleon close behind in sixth. Forza Horizon 6 alone has driven an estimated $197.7 million on Steam, pulling revenue three times faster than Forza Horizon 5 did at the same point after launch, with 3.5 million copies sold on the platform. A first-party Xbox title topping Steam's revenue chart while Microsoft lays off thousands of game developers is a contradiction so sharp it almost writes itself.

What stands out to me about this data isn't any single number. It's that Steam is growing fastest in the areas Valve has to invest the least in. Old games sell themselves. Chinese players are arriving organically. Publishers are crawling back because their alternatives failed. Valve's 30% cut has been controversial for years, and competitors like Epic have tried to undercut it with a smaller revenue share. None of it has mattered. Epic's store is still handing out free games to maintain relevance while Steam posts $11 billion half-years without breaking a sweat.

If the current pace holds through the second half of 2026, Steam could clear $22 billion for the full year, a figure that would have sounded absurd five years ago. Valve doesn't report its own financials, so these remain third-party estimates, but Alinea's methodology tracks Steam activity data and has been broadly consistent with what developers have shared publicly. The full year will depend on whether Q4 delivers another stacked release calendar, but given that H1 already outpaced last year's holiday window, Valve might not even need it to.