Steam took in an estimated $1.7 billion in September, its best month on record, according to the research firm Alinea Analytics as reported by Tom’s Hardware. That is roughly 13% more than September 2025, the previous high.
The timing is odd. It has been a miserable few months for anyone building a PC. The memory shortage driven by AI data center demand has pushed up DRAM and SSD prices, made cheap boards such as the Raspberry Pi 5 cost more, and NVIDIA has marked up its aging Shield TV Pro. Spending on games did not flinch.
Alinea puts the third quarter at $5.5 billion, up 12% on a year earlier. January through September comes to $16.5 billion, against $14.5 billion for the same months of 2025. If that pace holds through the autumn and winter sales, Steam ends 2026 above $20 billion, a line it has never crossed.
One caveat. Valve does not publish sales figures. Alinea models its numbers from player activity, review counts and pricing, so these are estimates, not audited accounts. Good for direction and scale, less good for the decimal point.
What sold
Wardogs went into early access on September 10 and earned an estimated $86.9 million in under three weeks. Nothing else was close. Onimusha: Way of the Sword took $30.4 million, The Blood of Dawnwalker $26.9 million, Bodycam $24.2 million and EA Sports FC 27 $20.7 million, according to a breakdown published by tbreak.
Free-to-play did quieter work. Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, PUBG and Dota 2 together brought in close to $168 million, which Alinea analyst Rhys Elliott called “nearly 10% of Steam’s entire revenue for the month.” Among the 500 top-grossing titles, free-to-play games were 16% of the list but took 25.6% of the money.
Old names ruled. Established franchises took 79.5% of top-500 revenue and remakes and remasters another 3.8%, leaving 20.5% for new IP. Games released in 2026 accounted for 33.6%.
Why would players keep paying? One plausible reading is that they are holding on to their current rigs longer and putting the money into games. Alinea’s data does not show that. Still, the biggest earners, from Counter-Strike 2 to Dota 2, run happily on modest hardware, and a $70 game costs far less than a RAM or GPU upgrade right now.
The release flow is not slowing. Steam had logged 20,220 new games as of October 1, with another 1,156 scheduled for October. That puts 2026 on course for more than 21,000, in the range of 2025’s 21,268.
