In a recent GDC game festival speech, V announced that 5863 games on the 2025 Steam platform earned over $100,000.
Tom Giardino, member of the Steam Operations Team, explained that only 3,000 games reached the $100,000 threshold in 2020 and nearly doubled over five years, highlighting the scale of the Platform ‘ s growth. He frankly said that $100,000 in revenue would mean different things to development teams of different sizes, but he believed that more and more games were finding successful paths at Steam. “We are also concerned about other income data, such as annual income of $500,000 and $1 million, which also have a very consistent curve,” Tom Giardino adds. “Another good news is that looking back at the user data that we shared before, the number of successful games on Steam basically keeps pace with the growth of users. Over the past five years, both online players, players in games and the number of successful games have roughly doubled.” The chief of the V-news agency, Kaci Aitchison Boyle, revealed that just a few weeks ago, Steam simultaneously peaked at 42 million online users. He clarified: “This is just the number of Steam clients running. Like me, sometimes even if you don’t consume or play games, you can hang Steam on your computer.”
On this basis, Tom Giardino provides another growth indicator: The game also has a new record of 13.9 million online players. “In order to better understand this data, it is possible to put the view back to 2020, with 13.9 million almost twice as many online players and game players as it was. “Tom Giardino says that these numbers are “good news” for developers, while acknowledging that concerns about the saturation of the platform do exist and stressing that V has been focusing on “expanding opportunities for the Steam platform”. That is why Steam will always be driven by user needs. He continued: “Many corporate structures are driven by numbers and growth, as well as by digital growth. This problem-solving structure generates a great deal of short-sighted thinking and sometimes inspires decisions that do not necessarily benefit the long-term sustainability of players or platforms. We are a relatively small company in terms of the number of employees. Moreover, we are a private enterprise with no investors, no need to focus on stock prices and no unrealistic expectations of unlimited growth.” In support of this, Tom Giardino states that the company has adjusted its daily preferential activities through “severe promotion of individualized recommendations”, while increasing the number of available preferences. These changes allow developers to access Steam ‘ s internal calendar directly and to choose their own daily ex gratia slots best suited to their needs. As a result, the number of “players” participating in daily benefits has increased significantly.
In 2025, there were 1,500 independent games on Steam participating in daily benefits, 69 per cent of which had never been involved in daily preferences before. At the same time, 8.2 million players purchased daily preferential games in 2025, an increase of 125 per cent over the same period. “That’s what we’re talking about. “As a result of these improvements, the day-to-day benefits earned by developers increased by 274 per cent over the same period, far exceeding our income growth and the growth of users. And because of our investment in the new system, more developers have actually earned more money from the daily benefits.”
