Steam clears $11 billion in six months, and the platform's grip on PC distribution tightens

On 10 July 2026, Alinea Analytics published a number that the rest of the gaming industry will now have to argue with: an estimated $11.1 billion in game sales on Steam during the first six months of the year. The figure, drawn from Alinea's recurring Steam estimator and circulated widely on X the same day, would put Valve's storefront on pace for its largest annual haul on record and re-anchor a debate that had drifted toward questions about Epic, mobile, and subscription churn.

The half-year total matters less as a bragging right than as a refutation. For roughly half a decade the conventional wisdom in industry coverage has held that the PC storefront market was fragmenting: Epic Games Store buying exclusives with ten-percent-of-revenue sweeteners, the Epic Games Store's free-game cadence pulling users off Steam's front page, subscription services such as Xbox Game Pass and, more recently, Ubisoft+ reshaping how players pay to play. The $11.1 billion figure, if Alinea's methodology holds, suggests the fragmentation story has limits. Steam is still where the buyers buy.

What the number actually counts

Alinea's half-year estimate is built from publicly observable Steam data: the live SteamDB ticker of concurrent users, the platform's published top-seller lists, review-volume rollups, and a proprietary revenue-per-user model that Alinea has refined across several reporting cycles. The methodology is not Steam-disclosed; Valve does not break out game-sale revenue. The $11.1 billion figure is therefore an estimate, not a statement of fact, and readers should treat the number as the strongest public approximation rather than a settled accounting entry. Steam itself has historically declined to comment on third-party revenue estimates, and there is no indication the company has changed that posture.

The figure also captures only direct game sales, not the second-order economics that have grown around the storefront. Steam Deck hardware revenue, Steam's cut of in-game marketplace transactions on community hubs, the platform's 30-percent revshare on most titles (reduced to 25 percent above $10 million and 20 percent above $50 million per the revshare tiers introduced in 2018), and Valve's own first-party releases (Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2) are folded into the headline; platform fees, subscription bundles such as Steam's seasonal sales events, and the now-mature Steam Workshop paid-mod revenue sit alongside standard boxed-equivalent purchases.

What the number does not capture is the regional weighting that has become central to PC gaming's growth story. China, where Steam operates a separate localised client under Steam China operated by Perfect World, contributes a substantial share of daily active users but a smaller share of dollar revenue per user, because of price localisation and a thinner mix of premium Western releases in the top sellers. Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America have all moved up the rankings of Steam's regional concurrent-user charts through 2024 and 2025, but those users skew toward free-to-play titles whose monetisation runs through community-marketplace cosmetic economies rather than the headline $60-equivalent purchase that anchors Alinea's average-revenue-per-user assumptions.

The China variable, deliberately understated

Steam's China footprint is the structural fact that most Western coverage of the storefront still underplays. The Steam China client, launched in February 2021 through a licensing partnership with Perfect World (the original Counter-Strike and Dota 2 publisher in mainland China, and Valve's longstanding local partner), runs as a separately curated store. Game approvals flow through Chinese regulators; the in-game economy is walled off from global Steam; and the catalogue of approved titles is narrower than the international storefront's. Yet Steam China has nonetheless become the largest legitimate PC game distribution channel inside the country, in part because the partnership model gives Beijing-aligned publishers a domestic route to market without forcing them to abandon the international Steam ecosystem for studios with cross-border staff.

The Western frame on Chinese gaming platforms tends to emphasise competition: Tencent's WeGame storefront, NetEase's various distribution channels, the mobile-first dominance of miHoYo and the post-HoYoverse ecosystem. That framing is accurate as far as it goes. What it understates is the degree to which Steam China has succeeded by playing within the regulatory perimeter rather than fighting it, a posture closer to the model used by Apple with its Chinese App Store than to the head-on collision Epic has sought in the United States and Europe. Valve's choice to operate through a domestic partner rather than demanding single-storefront access has bought the company something rarer than market share: durability. Western outlets reporting on Steam's half-year figures routinely omit this context, because the Chinese-market split makes the global headline number look smaller than the underlying footprint.

The counter-narrative: is the storefront actually winning?

The pushback to Alinea's $11.1 billion reading is straightforward and worth airing. A half-year revenue figure, even a large one, is not the same as a half-year profit figure; Steam's revshare terms mean Valve's own retained slice is a fraction of the headline. Platform competition is real: Epic Games Store's free-game cadence has, by Epic's own published numbers, retained tens of millions of accounts and continues to sign exclusivity deals for marquee indie and mid-tier releases. Subscription services continue to bleed demand from the a-la-carte model. And the mobile-first gaming market, dominated by App Store and Google Play economics, dwarfs PC by revenue even when Steam posts record half-years.

The dominant framing holds, but only up to a point. The $11.1 billion figure does not prove that storefronts are unbeatable; it proves that the centre of gravity in PC distribution has not moved. Steam remains the default destination for the highest-spending cohort of PC players, the cohort whose purchasing decisions shape which studios stay independent and which get acquired. The Epic Games Store has won a generation of players who play the free games and little else. Subscription services have won a generation of players who consume rather than own. But the dollar mass still sits on Steam, and that is what Alinea's estimate captures.

What to watch in the second half

Three data points will test the $11.1 billion number before the year closes. First, the autumn release calendar: Valve's own Counter-Strike 2 majors and Dota 2's The International sit in this window, alongside expected flagship releases from third parties that historically drive top-seller charts through year-end. Second, the Chinese Steam client's catalogue refresh in late summer, which historically moves the regional user-count needle. Third, any move by Epic Games Store to deepen its publisher revshare terms, a lever it has pulled twice before and which has, on prior occasions, produced visible shifts in where mid-tier studios list their launches.

The structural read is straightforward. Platform economics in PC gaming still reward scale above almost everything else: catalogue depth, regional licensing, payment-infrastructure reach, and the years of review and refund-policy trust that keep a high-spending cohort coming back. Steam's $11.1 billion half-year is not a surprise so much as a confirmation, written in dollars, of where the centre of the market still sits. The fragmentation story has not ended. It has, for now, stopped at the till.

Desk note: Monexus framed this against the default Western wire read, which treats Epic and subscription churn as the active story; we leaned instead on the storefront-gravity reading and surfaced the Steam China / Perfect World partnership as the structural fact most coverage omits.