Valve has published a 2024 recap, focusing on Steam-related features, tools, and stats. Let’s take a closer look at the data on platform growth and new game revenue.
2024 for Steam in numbers
- As Valve revealed in a new blog post, 2024 was a record year for Steam in terms of users buying newly released games.
- In 2024, more than 500 new Steam games grossed over $250k in their first month, up 27% year-over-year. More than 200 new releases surpassed $1 million in first-month gross revenue, up 15%.
- Overall, first-month gross revenue of new releases, including pre-launch revenue in case of pre-orders, has increased nearly 10x since 2014.
- 1.7 million new users who made their first purchase on Steam in 2023 across the 20 highest-grossing releases that year spent $73 million on premium titles and DLC from January 2024 through early March 2025. They also spent $20 million on in-game purchases.
- Those 1.7 million users have collectively spent over 141 million hours playing various games on Steam since making their first purchase in 2023.
- “Steam isn’t just a storefront — it provides social community, game discoverability, interactive events, and a deep set of game-enhancing features to attract and retain players who will be checking out new games in the future,” Valve noted.
- 2024 was a record year in terms of themed sales, including various fests focused on specific genres and game mechanics. Revenue during seasonal sales grew 10% year-over-year.
- Last year, over 900 event pages were created by third-party organizers, compared to just six in 2023.
Steam as a platform for first-time game developers
- In 2024, about 25% of monthly top-grossing games on the Steam charts came from developers releasing their first product on the platform. According to Valve, they represented “dozens of different countries.”
- The company highlighted TCG Card Shop Simulator, a store management sim created by Malaysian solo developer OPNeon. The game sold over 1 million copies on Steam in its first month, with the US, Australia, China, Germany, Pakistan, and Japan among the top 10 countries by units.
- Another example is Until Then, a story-driven visual novel inspired by Filipino culture and developed by local studio Polychroma Games. 92% of its sales came from outside the Philippines, resonating with a global audience on Steam.
- Valve believes that such cases are possible because of the platform’s server infrastructure, payment methods, language support, and other factors that help studios of all sizes reach players around the world.
It took years of investments in self-publishing tools, local currency support, localized documentation, and regional outreach to create these opportunities for studios that may have been unlikely to release a game on PC at all, much less find customers on other continents. All of that opportunity is built on top of translating the store UI into dozens of languages, expanding our content delivery network, onboarding new payment methods, and giving developers direct access to all our APIs and tools without friction or gatekeeping.
on creating opportunities for emerging studios
- Valve has been working to expand its global outreach for years. In its latest business update, the company noted that the number of new Steam users in China, Serbia, and Philippines has increased by more than 100% since 2019, with Japan, India, and Mexico up more than 150%.
- “Part of our mission on Steam is to reach gamers around the world,” Valve’s Kassidy Gerber said. “We invest a lot in making sure we price in the right currencies, accept the right payment methods, and connect our servers close to our customers.”
- Steam already supports 29 languages, with the top 5 being English (35% of all users), Simplified Chinese (28%), Russian (7.9%), Castilian Spanish (5.2%), and German (3.4%).
