Valve says 5,863 titles earned over $100,000 on Steam in 2025
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18 replies
Enough for one dev for a year ...such success.
and considering that there were over 120k games released on steam as of 2025 😵💫
game development is not the goldmine some think it is, i think there’s even a stat that half the games on steam don’t ever make more than 500$
i’d love to see a graph of the number of steam games VS the money they made. i’d guess that graph would look very exponential
I feel like you'd have to control for the obvious asset flips or just random, I guess, spam games thrown out on a daily basis. I don't think it'd move the needle that much tho
Then you'd also need to remove already successful "evergreen" titles in that case, which might land you back into the same. Not a lot of money for new games.
True. Gaming landscape feels weird rn, looking at it from current standing. Tough sledding for aspiring devs. I'm also right about that age where nostalgia tends to make everything new look a bit less shiny, so I may be choosing not to see the best current offerings.
And somehow that's actually better odds than getting a good job after university 1.2m applicants for 17k graduates
In the US maybe, $100k is several years wages in many countries.
Ok... Most of those are probably American made games. And even if it's 3 devs, that's not enough to keep most studios open, even tiny ones.
The point was it's not a lot.
Only making 100k for a small indie dev's first game is great.
Only making 100k for a AAA Electronic Arts or Ubisoft game would be fucking hilarious.
They had every chance to take Sea of Thieves, listen to what players hated about it, and make something better. They chose a different path.
Wouldn't be surprising though haha
I don't think the 5863 is limited to games released in 2025
that changes the math... a bit...
100k is not enough to pay even a single full time dev, so I wouldn't call this the success threshold.
How? That's over double what I make in a year, living in America too. Are game devs required to like eat something super expensive every day?
Because despite all the LLM slopaganda the laws of supply and demand give software engineers some leverage over prospective employers.
I see there was a fundamental misunderstanding, you see I thought you meant that 100k wasn't enough for someone to survive on, you simply meant that Software engineers have high standards.
So 113k released between 2016 and 2025 is about 12600 a year. We have only been told that 5863 games made more than 100k last year, not what their total lifetime revenues are. Bearing in mind games generally make the most money in the first year of release (of course there there is big variation and there is a tail but mostly), then very crudely as much as 46% of new games could be making at least 100K in the first year. That's an overestimate for many reasons but 5% is also a huge underestimate as the figure is using at all games released across 9 years and diluting the the 1 year figure we have. Also we need to bare in mind how much of the Steam library is slop and not an actual fully formed game, or is place holder entries for things like demos and even DLC.
The real figure will sit between those two extreme limits, it's not going to be as low as 5% but also not as high as 46%.