2015 was a big year for Valve and its online gaming platform Steam which saw it break numerous records as well as rake in a lot of money. Thanks to Steam Spy, an independent website which tracks all manner of different stats related to Steam, they have revealed that the paid games market on Steam was worth a total of $3.5 billion in 2015.
Not only is the paid games market estimated at $3.5 billion, but last year also saw a huge surge in the number of games which were released on Steam, mainly thanks to the Greenlight program. 3000 new games were released onto Steam in 2015, up by 1100 games from 2014 which only saw 1900 games released. In total, 350 million games were sold on Steam according to Steam Spy.
These figures don’t include any money generated through the sale of micro-transactions in free-to-play games or any DLC which is likely to have generated Steam and developers even more money on top. The $3.5 billion comes purely from paid game sales. As expected, Grand Theft Auto V
Steam Spy’s data can’t be 100% relied upon though as the figures don’t come from Valve or developers directly and are more estimates based on a number of different statistics such as how many people own each game etc, although Steam Spy can’t tell the difference between games bought on Steam or those bought or other sites such as G2A and then activated on Steam. That mean’s that the figure is unlikely to be truly accurate as many games will be bought elsewhere for cheaper prices. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Steam has really taken a step up in 2015 and generated billions of pounds.
*Source: SteamSpy