Steam just had its biggest half-year ever. new games were only 21% of it

Steam is having its most lucrative stretch in history: roughly $11.1 billion in gross game revenue in the first half of 2026, up about 14.5% year over year, on top of concurrent-user records north of 42 million set earlier in the year. But dig into where that money comes from and there's a number that should worry anyone launching a game in 2026: only 21% of it came from games actually released this year. A year ago that figure was 27%. Before that, 29%. Steam has never made more money, and it's never made less of it from new releases.

Where the money actually goes

The other ~79% flows to the back catalog and, above all, to evergreen live-service giants — Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, PUBG and their peers — plus deep-discount sales of older games during events like the Summer Sale (June 25–July 9 this year). These titles don't 'release'; they just keep earning, year after year, soaking up player time and money that never reaches this year's new games.

Why the 21% is a real problem, not a curiosity

For a big publisher, a smaller slice of a growing pie is still fine. For indie and AA developers, this is the discoverability crisis in a single statistic. A record number of games launch on Steam every year, competing for a shrinking share of spending, against a wall of established live-service titles that already own players' hours. It means a genuinely good new game can land into near-silence not because it's bad, but because the platform's economics increasingly reward the games people are already playing. The 21% figure is the clearest evidence yet that 'get it on Steam' is no longer close to a plan.

None of this is Steam failing — it's Steam succeeding so completely that its own back catalog has become the main competition for every new release. If you're making a game in 2026, the platform has never been bigger, and standing out on it has never been harder. Those two facts are the same fact.