Valve peels back the curtain in rare Steam presentation: "More games are finding success" than ever, and nearly 6,000 made over $100,000 last year

It's a great time to be a developer releasing games on Steam, according to Steam.

Valve offered a rare peek behind the curtain at Steam during this year's GDC, presenting a series of slides captured and shared to Bluesky by Game Developer's Chris Kerr. The presentation includes statistics suggesting that, despite the visibility problems facing an increasingly crowded pool of developers, studios are finding more success on Steam than ever before.

One particular slide, captioned "more games are finding success," shows a graph showing data from 2020 to 2025 with the amount of games having earned $100,000 in sales steadily climbing each year. Valve says that in 2025, the only year with an exact number attached, 5,863 games made their developers at least $100,000.

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Valve says more titles are finding success on Steam than ever before, despite concerns of over-saturation on the storefront.

— @kerrblimey.bsky.social (@kerrblimey.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-03-11T23:58:26.366Z

Speaking of discoverability, Valve says "we just want to put the right games in front of the right customer," which is certainly reflected in last year's menu redesign. It also says it's worked to improve its daily deals and that 1,500 games were featured in 2025, 69% of which had never been featured before. That resulted in 8.2 million Steam users buying a daily deal in 2025 and 125% more daily deal buyers overall.

Steam's discovery system is frequently praised as best-in-class even if some would argue there's a saturation of AI slop that's making it hard for indie devs to stand out. That issue has become pervasive across all storefronts, though.

Valve pleads "if you have a line on a bunch of RAM, we are in the market and would like to buy it," as AI and data centers make building Steam Machines a Herculean challenge