It’s being reported that Valve could be on track to make $20 billion this year from Steam. Claims by Alinea Analytics suggest that Steam made $1.7 billion in September 2026 alone, $5.5 billion in Q3, and $16.5 billion so far this year. And these figures appear to be just from game sales alone, not hardware. So what’s a private company making the same money a year as the entire nation of Madagascar to do with all that cash? We have a few ideas.

Valve has, to its credit, never gone public, meaning the company has never had shareholders to answer to. That also means that all that money and the resulting profit (given they’re private, we have no idea what the company’s outgoings are) gets to stay within or get paid out in dividends. There’s a reason Valve founder Gabe Newell not only owns luxury yachts, but owns a company that makes luxury yachts. The point is, Valve is not short on money, clearly spending nowhere close to the amount that’s coming in.

And let’s be very clear: the vast majority of what’s coming in is money taken from the developers and publishers making and selling the games. 30 percent of every sale on Steam goes directly to Valve, a figure that’s been heavily criticized for many years, but one on which Valve appears immovable. And with 20,000 games launching on Steam every year, and something that could be described as a monopoly on the PC games market, it’s hard not to see such astonishing profits as coming at the expense of tiny independent development teams in ways that are potentially predatory.

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