Steam's exploding sales numbers aren't telling the whole story

On Tuesday, PC giant Valve broke down the state of Steam for an eager audience at the 2026 Game Developers Conference. As Valve told it, things have never been better for Steam. User growth is exponential, game releases are up, and developers have way more tools to help them bring their games to new audiences. Alongside this torrent of good news, Valve proudly displayed a graph with encouraging numbers — or so it seemed. According to the graph, the publisher saw nearly 6,000 games earn at least $100,000 on the platform in 2025, a 30% increase over the five years between 2020 and 2025. Valve presented this data to dispel the narrative that Steam has too many games flooding its storefront. When a single year sees 19,000 new releases, developers are understandably anxious about the visibility of their games. Is everyone making games fighting for an increasingly small piece of the pie? Valve insists that isn't the case. "We've been able to make the pie substantially bigger," Steam's Tom Giardino told the audience at GDC. But as No More Robots founder Mike Rose recently pointed out on Bluesky, the situation is not so cut and dry. Rose correctly notes that the 6,000 games could include o