Steam Books' Best Half-Year as Consoles Slip – $11.1B in 2026

Valve's PC storefront Steam posted its highest-ever revenue in the first half of 2026, pulling in an estimated $11.1bn. The figure comes from market tracker Alinea Analytics and beats both the game-heavy end of 2025 and the first six months of that year. Alinea estimates these numbers; Valve does not publish its own revenue.

Alinea's head of market analysis, Rhys Elliott, ties the growth to several factors. Chinese players make up a large share of the base, new releases carry higher prices, and third-party publishers have returned to Steam after dropping their own launchers, Ubisoft among them. The China point stands out. By February 2025, half of all Steam accounts belonged to Chinese-speaking users, and that share has kept the platform's baseline high before any new release ships.

The publisher return reverses a trend from recent years. Studios that had pulled games to push buyers toward their own launchers have brought titles back to Steam, adding catalogue and sales that had drifted elsewhere. Higher prices on new releases lift the per-sale figures on top of that.

I think the China figure matters more than the game charts here, because a base that large sets the floor no matter what launches in a given season.

"Zoom out over the last decade and things get really crazy."

— Rhys Elliott

Over the past decade, Steam has nearly quintupled its revenue. Elliott noted a dip as the market cooled from its pandemic peak, then a steady return to growth across seven straight half-years. The first half of 2026 brought in close to five times what the same stretch of 2017 did.

Image: Alinea Analytics

Alinea's estimates name the year's top earners on Steam. Forza Horizon 6 pulled in $197.7m in under two months. Resident Evil Requiem made $194.5m since its February launch across 3.4m sales on Steam, with $1.3m of that from a single cosmetics pack. Crimson Desert, a new franchise, reached $190m after launching in March. Three indies follow close behind: Slay the Spire 2 at $141.7m, Subnautica 2 at $133.6m, and Meccha Chameleon at $71.3m. The list mixes big-budget releases with indies earning tens of millions each.

The PC surge lands as PlayStation and Xbox struggle. Microsoft's gaming revenue fell seven percent year-on-year, and this week the company pushed through another reset with fresh layoffs.

PlayStation has not fared much better. It has sold fewer copies of its first-party exclusives every year since 2020, and it recently confirmed it will not bring future exclusives to PC, closing off a revenue stream it had spent years building.

Both platforms face higher hardware costs tied to an AI-driven RAM shortage that has already pushed console prices up. Sony's plan to stop making game discs in 2028 drew a public backlash, including a petition against ending physical media. Microsoft has become the industry's target of choice as the scale of its layoffs sinks in.

I read the $11.1bn less as Valve doing something new and more as the rest of the market handing it customers. The forces behind the number sit largely outside Valve's control, while Sony and Microsoft keep losing players and goodwill in the same stretch.

Read also, Ubisoft released Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, the franchise's first remake, on July 9 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. On Steam, the new Assassin’s Creed remake passed 104,756 concurrent players, the first game in the series to clear 100,000 and well above the previous record of 64,825 set by Assassin's Creed Shadows. Ubisoft said it sold 2 million copies across all platforms within 24 hours. On Metacritic the remake briefly held the series' best user rating and now sits at 8.7, level with Assassin's Creed II.