A long time ago, this one Seattle-based company realized that making its own stuff doesn’t really bring in the most cash and decided that selling other folks’ products was the way to go. But I never thought it’d come to these levels, as apparently, this small private business raked in $11 billion in the first six months of 2026.
That is according to Tom’s Hardware, which, citing Alinea Analytics, writes that Valve earned some $11 billion in gross revenue from video game sales on its platform, Steam. This accounts for only the first six months of this year and is some 14.5 percent more than the same period last year.
This increase in revenue from last year, which is basically a given every year for Valve, is due to great holiday periods and major game releases but also due to a significant uptick in Chinese players (90 percent and more of whom are PC gamers). An overall increase in game prices, too, has played a role in boosting Valve’s numbers.
Among those major game releases is a good chunk of viral indies, which have sold an ungodly amount of copies, such as Meccha Chameleon‘s stellar release in June that saw it ship over 15 million copies in just a few weeks’ time. Publishers bolstering their backlogs and discounting them massively due to Steam’s “publisher sales” also seems to have contributed to such an increase in revenue, but that just tells me people are super eager to play games of yore rather than all the slop coming out nowadays.
I myself have bought both Dishonored games and am playing through them right now and having much more fun with them than with anything new I have bought in the last year or so (excluding Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem).
Further indication of this so-called “problem” is that only 21 percent of Steam’s revenue this year came from games actually released in 2026, down from 27 percent in the first half of 2025 and 29 percent from the same period of 2024. People are playing older games more and more precisely because new ones cost $80, old ones can be obtained cheaply through sales, and, well, tend to be better than the current thing.
At any rate, though, Valve keeps doing what it’s been doing for many years now: nothing, and it just cannot stop winning. It’s the most consumer-friendly platform out there and is going to be a very safe harbor for all the PlayStation escapees once discs are completely dead.
