In 2023, more than 500 games earned more than $3 million (around £2.3 million) in gross revenue via Steam, according to Valve. The stat was shared as part of their annual summary, a breakdown of the platform’s past year in terms of new features and performance.
The gross revenue for each game was generated in the “calendar year alone”, and is a new record. For those bad at maths, those 500 games generated at least $1.5 billion in gross revenue.
Given that several of those games would have earned a great deal more than $3 million – and that there were over 14,000 games released on Steam in 2023 in total – you can start to get a sense of just how vast Steam is. Compare and contrast with numbers from the Epic Games Store shared last week, where total spending on third-party games fell to $310 million in 2023.
Valve say that the diversity of games finding success on the platform is growing. “Every month we publicly track the top 20 new releases by revenue, and the top five most-played new release free-to-play titles. In 2023, more than a quarter of those new releases were from studios releasing a game on Steam for the very first time, and those new studios hailed from more than two dozen different countries.”
There are a handful of other stats included in the full annual summary. Steam surpassed 33 million concurrent users for the first time, and the popularity of Steam sale events and fests continued to grow.
Apparently Steam is also being used across seven continents, with the platform having “delivered 200GB of installs and updates to Antarctica in the last seven days.” Presumably that’s one lonely Antarctic researcher downloading Modern Warfare.
