The Games Industry Reacts To Valve’s Misleading Boast About How More Games Are Making Money On Steam

During last week’s GDC gathering in San Francisco, Valve gave a presentation during which the company boasted of the growing numbers of games proving profitable when sold via Steam. This was demonstrated by a bar chart that attempted to give the impression that things are just getting better and better for developers releasing games on its platform. However, just a moment’s scrutiny reveals a thousand holes in these numbers—something that has annoyed members of the games industry not only because it’s deceptive, but because boasting about this suggests, to some at least, that Valve is remaining deaf to the issues affecting those unable to find an audience.

Steam’s chart was designed to communicate that more games than ever are seeing revenue of over $100,000 per year. This, were it so clear cut, would be splendid news. According to the chart, in 2020 just 3,000 games “earned” $100k, but by 2025 that number had reached 5,863. Let’s call it 6,000 for ease. That means twice as many games are hitting this figure compared to five years ago. Trebles all round! Except, there are just so many different ways to poke holes in this representation that it immediately sinks.

First of all, you need to take into consideration the numbers of games released on Steam each year. In 2020, that figure was an extraordinary 9,647—a number so high that it was becoming increasingly fraught for any smaller developer to have their game even seen by potential customers. In 2025, that number was…19,997. So as the number of games hitting $100k doubled, so did the number of games released in a year. Which, one could argue by percentages, is no progress at all. (And note that the 6,000 figure is mostly made up of games not released in 2025! We’ll get to that below.)

Secondly, this chart absolutely ignores inflation. You’d need to make $125,000 today to have earned the same in terms of sheer value as $100,000 in 2020, so it’s entirely possible for a significantly higher number of games to be reaching that figure now but in real terms be making significantly less.

And thirdly, while “one hundred thousand dollars” might sound like a big chunk of money, in reality it’s a pittance in the world of games development. And even more so when you take into account how Valve takes a whopping 30 percent of that money! $100,000 in a year—the minimum amount made to be included in the figure—instantly becomes $70,000. If you’re a tiny indie team of just five people, and for some reason (perhaps a magical genie) the only expense you needed to cover from your game’s sales was salaries, then that would work out to $14,000 each. Oh, but I forgot to deduct business tax. So closer to $10,000 each—which is admittedly so little that there’d not be much personal tax to pay on it. Oh, and by 2026 figures, a U.S. annual salary under $15,960 is considered to be below the poverty line. So…yay Valve?

(A second chart shown at the same presentation by Valve’s Tom Giardino, which has been less widely spread around, showed figures for $500,000 games, a total reached by 2,395 games in 2025, also double 2020’s number. This therefore shows us that of those 5,863 $100,000+ games, 3,468 of them made less than half a million, although we don’t know how much less.)

If anything, the fact that so few games are hitting such a grimly low target is damning of Steam and what it offers developers. The graph’s caption of “More games are finding success” appears pretty indefensible after the briefest thought. (We’ve reached out to Valve to ask if the company still stands behind this claim, following the online response.)

Peanuts

Mike Rose, boss of indie publisher No More Robots, took to BlueSky to vent after seeing the GDC talk. He described the figures as “a tricksy way to make it look like everything is fine,” pointing out that the figures mean of the 150,000 games on Steam, just four percent made more than $100k in 2025. He also made it clear just how little money that is to a game studio. “$100k revenue = roughly $50k to the dev, after Valve’s cut + taxes,” Rose explains. “How many multi-person studios do you know that could survive after making $50k from their game launch? Not many!!”

Indie developer Tom Sennett (creator of RunMan) posted on BlueSky to say how the claims had irritated him. “Glad to see people dragging Valve for this,” he wrote, adding, “$100,000 is peanuts, and what this really says is like 100,000 games on Steam basically made no money at all last year.”

Elephants

Games industry guru Simon Carless responded to the data on his Game Discover Co newsletter, having attended the talk by Giardino and Kaci Aitchison Boyle (who you’ll know from those often excellent Steam fest promotional videos). He points out that these numbers, of course, aren’t six thousand new games making a hundred grand, but that the number includes the perennial earners from every previous year. That means a huge number among them will be your decade-old Counter-Strikes and DOTA 2s, rather than fresh new releases. In fact, if Carless’s numbers are correct, it’s far fewer than you’d guess: he estimates the number of new games among those $100,000+ earners is just 29 percent of the total. That’s around 1,700 games, or as Carless observes, 8.5 percent of games released in 2025.

Others have pushed back against the reaction, including Frozen Synapse developer Paul Kilduff-Taylor, who feels that the fact that the percentage of games making a profit is maintaining pace with the number of games being released suggests that Steam is in fact coping with the inundation of tens of thousands of releases, as games are clearly still being discovered. I’d argue that Carless’s figures showing how few of those profitable games are actually released in a given year does somewhat undermine this argument, but it’s a decent point to take on board that Valve’s hands-off position on store curation is allowing at least some games to reach players. (As someone who spends half his life trying to find the excellent games that are let down by Steam’s utter mess of a storefront, I rather strongly believe it could and should be an awful lot better, but I take the point on board.) It’s worth noting that Kilduff-Taylor does also say, “Making games has never been a good idea,” describing it as a “wildly unpredictable soul-sapping business that turns on the whims of a highly capricious market.”

Circuses

As Kilduff-Taylor implies, no one is owed a living selling video games. However, the issue here is a company with a monopolistic dominance of the PC market that seems infuriatingly uninterested in responding to the consequences of a lack of curation on its store, and when it boasts deliberately obfuscated figures to create the illusion that the situation is better than it is, that needs to be called out. Speaking to Polygon, Mike Rose acknowledged that Valve is making efforts to improve “discoverability” on Steam, and I’m told by some indie developers that the tools behind-the-scenes do occasionally improve. But far more often I hear from developers who feel betrayed by Valve’s promises of front-page promotions that don’t seem to come to pass (one told me their game was featured for ten minutes), the store’s pushing of already successful games over newer and lesser-known titles, and the way the company is making it increasingly difficult for smaller teams to generate Steam codes to provide copies of their games to press, influencers and for promotional giveaways.

It also sticks in the craw of many that Valve delivers presentations that suggest things are better than ever, when the lived reality is a deeply brutal time for the games industry. “What has irked me here,” Rose told Polygon, “is that they also continuously love to make out publicly like everything is absolutely fantastic, no problems here at all, while the industry burns down.”

Meanwhile, Valve continues to make extraordinary amounts of money from Steam, taking its colossal 30 percent tithe from every game sold. If Valve genuinely wanted to see more developers make more money, this would obviously be the very first change it could make, reducing that figure for smaller teams such that there was even the possibility of them making a profit. Instead, in 2018 the company did the precise opposite, lowering its take for only the largest publishers—a truly grotesque move.

While there’s no easy answer for how to handle the ludicrous situation of 20,000 new PC games being released a year on Steam, it’s obvious far more could be done to try to help. Pretending that more developers than ever are making it rich suggests that there’s little intention of doing so, and that is rightly frustrating those who have little choice but to release their games on Valve’s platform.