Gabe Newell certainly has enough money to spend his time on his yachts. After all, Valve is extremely successful financially.
It’s easy to feel like the gaming industry is a never-ending tornado of shattered dreams and hellfire, and that’s because it really is. At the same time, however, it generates a lot of money, and the PC gaming world is growing faster than the mobile and console markets combined. On Thursday, Alinea Analytics reported that Steam is wrapping up its best six months ever.
“In the first half of 2026, we estimate that games on Steam generated $11.1 billion in gross revenue, the platform’s highest half-year ever. That’s up 14.5% from the first half of 2025 and up 8% from the second half of 2025, which is more impressive given that the second half of the year usually wins with seasonal sales and holiday purchases,” wrote Rhys Elliott, Alinea’s head of market analysis.
Elliott highlights some of the main reasons for this growth: new games are more expensive, blockbusters that are popular among friends (such as Meccha Chameleon) rake in mountains of money in the blink of an eye, and third-party publishers like Ubisoft have returned to Steam after unsuccessfully attempting to move away from the platform to work with smaller players. All of this follows a very long upward trend. Steam’s annual revenue rose from $5.5 billion in 2017 to nearly $20 billion in 2025. A growing share of total sales also comes from older games. So far, only 21% of Steam’s 2026 revenue has come from games released this year, down from 29% in 2024.
A number of new games have generated massive revenue. Based on gross revenue, the top five new games are Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil: Requiem, Crimson Desert, Slay the Spire 2, and Subnautica 2, with Mecha Chameleon slipping into sixth place. Seeing an Xbox-exclusive game at the top of the list can be particularly frustrating, considering that the industry’s biggest companies continue to undermine the very teams they rely on.
