Steam's Download Scale Hits Mind-Boggling 100 Exabytes in 2025

If you have been online this week, you probably saw the headlines about Steam hitting some kind of massive download milestone. The numbers are genuinely staggering: in 2024 Valve delivered about 80 exabytes to customers, and in 2025 that grew to 100 exabytes. For context on what that means, Steam users are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates per day, which is about 190,000 GB of data per minute. To put that in perspective, an exabyte is one billion gigabytes. The figures reflect something straightforward: gaming has become deeply embedded in how people spend their time online, and the games themselves are getting bigger. Five years ago, Steam crossed 25 million concurrent users for the first time, and in the years since has grown at a pace of around 3.4 million additional concurrent users per year, reaching 42 million peak concurrent users. The bandwidth growth makes sense alongside user expansion. More players mean more downloads. Larger game files mean more total data per installation. That drives infrastructure costs, which explains why Valve has been investing heavily in its backend systems to handle the load. What is worth noting is not just the numbers themselves, but what they signal about the modern gaming industry: this is no longer a niche hobby. It is a vast, global system moving hundreds of exabytes of data annually to satisfy consumer demand. Valve's Year in Review also touched on revenue distribution. Thanks to revenue share tiers it launched in 2018 at 75% and 80% depending on sales, the revenue share paid out across all non-Valve games on Steam in 2025 was 76%. That suggests Valve has succeeded in its publicly stated goal of making the platform financially attractive to developers beyond just the biggest studios, though small developers on the standard 30% tier still face structural disadvantages compared to top-tier publishers. The infrastructure challenge is real. Delivering 100 exabytes requires robust content distribution networks operating across multiple continents. A single major game launch can briefly overwhelm regional infrastructure. Yet Steam has managed to scale alongside user growth without the catastrophic outages that plagued other platforms in earlier years. For Australian gamers specifically, the growth matters. Regional server capacity directly affects download speeds. As Steam's bandwidth footprint expands, ISPs and network operators face pressure to provision adequate capacity during peak times. The 274 petabytes-per-day average hides significant spikes during major releases and seasonal sales events. The real takeaway is this: gaming is now infrastructure. The fact that we are casually discussing exabyte-scale data movements shows how completely the medium has scaled. A decade ago, these figures would have seemed impossible. Today they are routine.