this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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47
Valve says 5,863 titles earned over $100,000 on Steam in 2025 (www.gamedeveloper.com)
submitted 5 hours ago by commander@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] Ryoae@piefed.social 4 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

He conceded that earning $100,000 could mean wild success for one team or "total disaster" for another, but reiterated his belief that "dramatically more games" are finding success on the PC storefront.

I don't know with that. I think most teams would be happier getting more than 100k. If you're an indie team and you're driven by how well you want your game to go, I would think you'd like to make more than 100k. Especially given how games bigger than yours go to multi-million statuses.

Also he never described what number of said team that 100k would be good for. I think maybe a 2-person team. But more than 2, like 10, then making 100k would be considered a total disaster scenario.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

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.

[–] FirmDistribution@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

According to steamdb, 113,397 games were release between 2016 and 2025.

5863 represents 5% of those games. The percentage is significantly lower since thousands of games were released before 2016.

Of course we can analyze more things, such as games that did very well 5 years ago, but sold practically nothing this year. We'd only need to know the titles that were released in 2025 and earned over $100,000

[–] BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.world 1 points 50 minutes ago

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%.

[–] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 11 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Enough for one dev for a year ...such success.

[–] carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

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

[–] CMLVI@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago

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