A new analysis of 99,206 paid Steam games puts the top 1% at 84.5% of all estimated revenue. One of the researchers built Valve’s discovery tools.
Half of every paid game on Steam has earned less than an estimated $3,622 across its entire lifetime.
That comes from the Steam Revenue Report, published by game discovery site We Love It. Ichiro Lambe and Matt Martindale of Totally Human Media worked with Dr. Tim Ermilov of VaporLens to analyze 99,206 paid games.
Every figure is an estimate. Valve does not publish revenue, so the researchers reverse-engineered earnings from Steam user review counts.
What the percentiles look like
The distribution is the finding.
50th percentile: under $3,622 lifetime
90th percentile: roughly $236,184
99th percentile: starts at $15,872,031
Top 1%: an estimated 84.5% of all Steam revenue
The report’s own summary of its central chart is blunt. “On a linear scale the same chart is a flat line and about two hundred visible dots, which is the whole story of Steam’s economy in one picture.”
Those visible dots include Half-Life 2, Vampire Survivors, Terraria, Among Us, Stardew Valley, Valheim, Schedule 1, Palworld, and Baldur’s Gate 3. GTA 5 sits above all of them.
What the median actually pays a developer
Run the median through Valve’s cut and the number gets smaller.
Valve takes 30% of gross. So an estimated $3,622 lifetime gross leaves roughly $2,535 for whoever made it, before tax, before refunds, before whatever the engine licence cost.
That is the lifetime figure for the game sitting exactly in the middle of the store.
8,024 games have no reviews at all
Out of 99,206 paid games analyzed, 8,024 have never received a single Steam review.
That is about 8% of the paid catalogue with no recorded player feedback whatsoever. In a study that estimates sales from review counts, those games are the ones the method cannot even measure.
Which is the part worth sitting with. Lambe worked at Valve from 2018 to 2020, and per his own LinkedIn, co-created Steam Labs there to improve game discovery and recommendation.
The person who helped build Valve’s discovery tools has now published the numbers showing 8,024 paid games that discovery never reached.
What the numbers can’t tell you
Review-based estimation is the standard method for Steam research and it has known limits.
Review-to-sale ratios vary by genre, price point, and region. The approach cannot see bundles, key sales outside Steam, or refunds. The researchers state the caveat themselves rather than burying it.
Treat the shape as reliable and any individual game’s figure as approximate.
The report is free to read, with interactive charts and a percentile lookup, which means anyone who wants to argue with the methodology can go and do it against the actual data.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
We Love It, the Steam Revenue Report itself, its percentile figures, and its stated methodology
GamesRadar+ (August 18, 2026), the analysis breakdown, the researcher credits, and Lambe’s Steam Labs background