Steam has just closed out its biggest month ever, with the PC storefront seeing an explosive end to 2025 as holiday sales and player spending surged to record levels.
According to data from Alinea Analytics, Steam generated $1.6 billion in gross revenue in December 2025, marking the highest-grossing month the platform has ever recorded.
Over 100 million players are estimated to have contributed to Steam’s December total, highlighting just how big holiday spending was across the platform.
The spike lines up with Steam’s annual Winter Sale, which consistently ranks as one of the biggest spending events in PC gaming. Deep discounts, DLC bundles, and long-running hits did much of the heavy lifting, with several major titles hitting their lowest prices ever.
Steam hits record-breaking holiday sales revenue
One of the biggest driving forces of sales was the extraction shooter ARC Raiders, which sold around 250,000 copies on Boxing Day alone.
While ARC Raiders led by copies sold across the holidays, Counter-Strike 2 remained Steam’s top game by revenue, proving how free-to-play titles driven by cosmetic spending continue to dominate the platform’s earnings.
Valve takes a cut of all transactions of CS2 skins on the Steam marketplace, and with CS2 being the most popular game on the platform, the volume of transactions is very high.
Even Detroit: Become Human, the sci-fi interactive story from Quantic Dream, sold 993K copies during the sale as players flocked to buy the title at its discounted price of $4 during the Winter Sale. The viral co-op climbing game, Peak, also shifted 779K copies in the two weeks.
The record month also comes on the back of Steam hitting a new all-time peak of 41.8 million concurrent players on January 4, 2026. Whether Valve’s digital storefront will be able to beat its sales and player count this year remains to be seen, but it’s an impressive start to the New Year.
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