Steam is a behemoth. Valve’s functional monopoly on the PC market has generated $15 billion in gross revenue so far this year – up about 15% from the same period in 2025.
And the first eight months of this year have already leapfrogged 2023’s total. This year will almost certainly end well above $20 billion for the first time.
In perhaps less positive news, Steam has had 19K new releases this year, already approaching 2025’s number and surpassing 2024’s… And we’ve got the whole gen-AI slop wave imminent.
But that’s a story for another time.
What are 2026’s top new games on Steam by revenue so far?
By all counts, 2026 has been a bloody fantastic year for new games on Steam, with plenty more bangers to come. You can see our estimates for the top new 2026 games by revenue on Steam below:
In the past, we’ve written about each of these games ad nauseam. We won’t do it again, so you can catch an overview in this post we wrote about two months ago, and the links below have our launch deep dives on each game:
But yeah, in total, these six games make up a little under $1B of 2026’s Steam gross revenues so far, accounting for about 6.6%.
The top 100 of new 2026 games by gross revenues this year is about $2.4B, or about 15.9% of 2026’s Steam overall revenues so far. Of the new-game top 100, 63% were actually new IP, but 52.5% of the revenue ($1.25B) came from established IP.
But it’s worth noting Crimson Desert, with its $203M, accounts for about 18% of all new-IP revenue in the top 100. When we take Crimson out of the analysis, the 62 new-IP games make up only about 39%. So there are a lot of mid-market new IP games in that list.
Speaking of mid-market…
Steam’s “mid-market” is mostly a bunch of older blockbusters in a trench coat
Last month, Joost van Dreunen (one of my personal heroes and a friend of Alinea’s) published a cracking piece – as he always does – Revenge of Steam’s mid-market. If you haven’t given it a read, do so. It’s a very sharp look at shifting PC economics this year.
The argument, in short: growth on the world’s biggest PC storefront has stopped flowing to the blockbusters and started flowing to the middle.
Joost is absolutely right that catalogue is making up a bigger chunk of the release calendar. But there’s one part of the piece that I’d like to add to. The post treats the entire 101-1000 ranked Steam games by revenues as mid-market.
While plenty of mid-market games are indeed on that list, many of the games are behemoths of years gone by sliding down the charts years after launch. It was the first thing that sprung to mind reading the fantastic piece, and a few commenters also caught this.
We checked out the Alinea estimates for the top 1,000 Steam games by gross revenue in 2026, alongside each title’s first release date and its lifetime gross revenue to date, then zoomed in on the 900 games ranked 101 to 1,000. A few things jumped out:
They’re mid-market, relatively speaking: Mid-market is a fair description of these games when looking at 2026 revenues in a vacuum. The median title has pulled in about $4M in 2026, from $19.9M at rank 101 to $1.9M at the bottom. Sounds pretty mid-market to me too
But the majority are older games: Of the 900, 83% launched before 2026, two-thirds are two years old or more, and just 17% are 2026 games. There’s a lot of catalogue stuff here. Games that have made $50M+ in total since launch account for 51% of the list’s 2026 revenue. So it’s mostly old catalogue, not a rising new middle.
There are older blockbusters galore: About a third of the games have earned over $50M in their lifetime, 22.3% over $75M, 140 over $100M, and 5.2% over $200M. And this list just covers Steam. Many of the games have generated just as much revenue on other platforms.
There are still plenty of mid-tier games in the list: There’s a pretty big minority of what I’d call mid-market games in the list, though, including Mortal Shell II (BANGER), Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, and The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin
But when you look at some of the other games in the list, the number of blockbusters is difficult to overlook:
And these games aren’t cherry-picked. Games like Skyrim, Battlefield 2042, The Elder Scrolls Online, DOOM Eternal, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Devil May Cry 5, Total War: Warhammer II, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus, and many other iconic titles show up as well.
So what’s all this mean?
The thesis – that the top 10 is shrinking while the middle grows – only works if the middle is made of new mid-sized games. But our estimates show that isn’t quite the case. And where a game ranks on Steam today doesn’t really tell you what kind of game it is.
A game grossing $4M on Steam in 2026 can seem mid-market now, but if it was built on a $100M budget years ago – generating $200M+ lifetime – it’s apples-to-oranges with a scrappy AA team on a $5M budget. They just happen to be right next to each other on the 2026 chart.
While there are plenty of mid-sized and indie heavy hitters (especially on Steam), the market is still largely a hit-driven one. It’s just that many are blockbusters of years gone by sold at a discount (one of Steam’s best value propositions, honestly).
None of this is a knock on Joost –just a bit more colour to an excellent piece (and the kinds of pieces the industry needs more of).
The last word
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