Steam earns record $11.1 billion in first half of 2026

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It's easy to feel like the videogame industry is an endless tornado of shattered dreams and hellfire, and that's because it is . But it also brings in a lot of money, and our beloved PC gaming space in particular is growing faster than both mobile and console markets. Thursday, a report from Alinea Analytics said Steam is just exiting its biggest six months ever.

"In the first half of 2026, we estimate that games on Steam generated $11.1B in gross revenue, the platform’s highest-ever half-year," wrote Rhys Elliott, Alinea's head of market analysis. "That’s up 14.5% on H1 2025, and up 8% even on the holiday-heavy H2 2025, which is the more remarkable comparison given the back half of the year usually wins on seasonal sales and holiday buys."

The full blog highlights some of the biggest reasons for all this growth: new games are more expensive, friendslop megahits like Meccha Chameleon rake in mountains of cash before you can blink, and third parties like Ubisoft are back on Steam after they tried and failed to escape Gabe's dread labyrinth to play ball with Steam's lessers.

The full list of causes and takeaways is in the blog, but this all follows a very long upward trend: as the report states, Steam's yearly revenue has gone from $5.5 billion in 2017 to roughly $20 billion in 2025. A growing percentage of all those sales is from old games, too: so far, "just 21%" of Steam's 2026 revenue has come from games that released this year, down from 29% in 2024.

That said, plenty of new games have been big moneymakers so far: the top five in terms of gross revenue for new games are Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert, Slay the Spire 2, and Subnautica 2 (Meccha Chameleon snuck into sixth place). It might be especially galling to see a first-party Xbox game at the top of that list given, you know, everything . It's hard to imagine this growth will continue—or even amount to much—if the industry's biggest companies continue to destroy the teams they depend on .

2026 games : All the upcoming games

Best PC games : Our all-time favorites

Free PC games : Freebie fest

Best FPS games : Finest gunplay

Best RPGs : Grand adventures

Best co-op games : Better together