Valve’s annual review post is very positive, but it’s worth taking a closer look at what the Gabe Newell-led company has to say.

According to Valve, the number of concurrent players on Steam has nearly doubled in five years, and last year those users all played more new games than ever before. The company claims that 2024 was the best year ever for the Steam platform in terms of new game customers. Last year, new release revenue on Steam, which Valve defines as revenue from the first 30 days of a product’s release plus any pre-orders, was ten times higher than in 2014. More than 500 games generated more than $250,000 in new release revenue, with more than 200 of those games earning more than $1 million. That’s an increase of 27 percent and 15 percent, respectively, over the 2023 numbers.

The company also provided a graph showing the steady growth in annual new release revenue since 2017. However, the graph does not show exactly what the revenue numbers mean. Without numbers or bars showing revenue from games outside of the new release period, the picture is incomplete. For example, if revenue from games on the live service had increased by an even larger percentage, these larger new release sales would have actually accounted for a declining portion of Steam’s revenue.

Every year, Valve publishes a list of Steam’s biggest moneymakers, and there’s no shortage of familiar names among the 2024 record-breakers: Palworld, Helldivers 2, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, Black Myth: Wukong, but there are also the typical titles (DotA 2, Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, PUBG Battlegrounds). However, the trend in revenue growth from new releases provides further context for the result revealed in last year’s Steam Replay (only 15% of users’ time was spent on games released in 2024), compared to 9% in 2023 and 17% in 2022.

The results are good, but we don’t have all the data to draw conclusions…

Source: PCGamer