Let's be real: when Valve walked into GDC last week and announced that 5,863 games earned $100,000 or more on Steam in 2025, up from 3,000 in 2020, it looked like good news. Twice as many profitable games. Sounds like the platform is getting friendlier for developers, right?
The gaming industry, particularly the indie developers who actually depend on Steam, immediately saw through it.
While the number of games hitting $100K doubled, the number of games released on Steam each year also doubled. In raw percentage terms, nothing changed. Of the 150,000 games on Steam, just 4% made more than $100K in 2025. Valve's headline stat becomes a lot less impressive when framed that way.
But the numbers get worse when you actually try to live on them. $100K in revenue becomes roughly $50K after Valve's 30% cut and taxes, according to Mike Rose, boss of indie publisher No More Robots. Rose pointed out how little money that is, asking "How many multi-person studios do you know that could survive after making $50K from their game launch?"
There's another layer too. Of the 5,863 games hitting the $100K mark, only 29% were actually released in 2025; the rest are longstanding earners like Counter-Strike and DOTA 2. So Valve's big success number mostly includes games that were already successful. The actual number of new releases making $100K in 2025 was around 1,700, or 8.5% of the 19,997 games released that year.
Valve's argument has some merit. The platform featured over 1,500 games in Daily Deals in 2025, with 69% appearing for the first time, and 8.2 million customers purchased a Daily Deal. Developer revenue from these promotions increased 274% year-over-year, allowing more developers to earn meaningful income. That's genuine progress for a slice of developers.
The frustration isn't really about the statistics themselves. It's about what they represent. The industry is annoyed because the presentation is deceptive, and because boasting about it suggests Valve remains deaf to the issues affecting developers unable to find an audience. When a platform takes 30% of every sale and maintains minimal curation, developers argue there's an obvious fix: lower the cut for smaller teams, invest more in discovery tools, or actually moderate the storefront.
Valve argues that other platforms are driven by quarterly earnings calls and short-term thinking that isn't good for long-term sustainability. Being private lets Valve take a different approach. That philosophy isn't wrong. But the data Valve is presenting glosses over a system where thousands of developers pour months or years into games that earn less than minimum wage.
For Australian developers and players, the takeaway is straightforward: Steam remains the best option for reaching a global audience, but that access comes with brutal odds. More games earning money is genuinely better than fewer. But let's not pretend the platform has solved the discoverability crisis when the maths show most developers still lose.