Who won Steam's 'Best of 2025' revenue rankings?

Publikováno: 6.1.2026

We look at multiyear trends, too. Also: paid marketing analysis & lots of news.

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

And we’re back - did you miss us? That’s OK, you don’t have to answer that question. But GameDiscoverCo is re-energized and ready to go for 2026, and the dynamic PC and console game market isn’t getting any less… dynamic. So let’s hit it.

Before we start, a key holiday book for us: Chris Hayes’ ‘The Sirens’ Call’. It’s high level, but asks the right big questions - one reviewer explains: “In the same way industrialization in the 19th century turned labor into a commodity, we now have turned attention into a commodity. But attention is what we are.” (We think about it constantly.)

[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today-~85 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game discovery news: eShop clone woes abound..

Fun fact: neither of these games are official & are the only keyword results when you search on the Switch eShop! (Ugh.)

So let’s start the year by sorting through the (lots of!) game platform & discovery news since we last checked in. And it goes a bit like this:

Who won Steam’s Best of 2025 revenue rankings?

Every year at year-end, predominant PC game platform Steam puts out its ‘Best Of The Year’ charts - and here’s the countdown for 2025. Overall, these charts are great for tracking multi-year trends.

Reminder: the charts, such as these for the Top 100 highest-grossing Steam games of 2025 - are sorted by Valve into Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze tiers, but randomly displayed within those tiers. (So you get some idea of ranking, but not exact rank.) What’s particularly fascinating is seeing which games rose up and down in the tiers.

But before we do that, here’s the top-grossing Steam games in 2025 (in all tiers except Bronze), listed by the year that the game originally came out:

Our initial reaction on this is that it’s more front-loaded for recency than we expected, despite ‘ancient’ GaaS titles (Counter-Strike!) staying strong. And indeed, if you look at the same chart for 2024, 24 of the games were released in ‘that year or the previous year’. But this time, 31 of the titles debuted in ‘this year or the previous year’.

Why would this be? It’s possible that 2025 was just a super-strong year for new games. It’s also possible that with more and more ‘catalog games’ being sold cheaply on discount, sorting by revenue will favor $60 newcomers & viral hits (vs. games at 25-50% of the price that still do good ‘long tail’.) It’s probably.. a combo of these things?

But let’s go deeper. We documented the top-grossing games from 2019 to 2025 by tier(Google Drive doc!), and it behoves us to go through each tier and talk about what’s interesting. Let’s start with the Platinum tier (which GDCo estimates at >$125m gross):

Reminder: this is not a ranked order, it’s randomized… and Monster Hunter Wilds was Bronze in 2024 purely on pre-orders (!)

Points of interest here: Valve’s first-party F2P duo (Counter-Strike 2 and DOTA 2) have been Platinum tier constantly for the last 4 years, as have battle royale standout PUBG: Battlegrounds & shooter stalwart Apex Legends.

Everything else is ‘new’, though, with Marvel Rivals the sole newer F2P winner*, and a lot of other usual suspects (ARC Raiders, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Battlefield 6, Monster Hunter Wilds.) Also impressive to see Schedule I and R.E.P.O. make it on here, despite a much lower price point…

(*One point of order: last year, Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 was listed in the Platinum tier, but this year, Steam has changed to showing the generic Call Of Duty app, which includes F2P and paid elements, in Platinum. So it’s not ‘new’, really, but a different app name/combo.)

Where it gets more interesting still is Gold (above, ~$75-$125m). There’s many GaaS titles with reliable yearly revenues, but would y’all have picked Warframe & Dead By Daylight as the only ones to keep Gold tier for the last four years? Cos it’s those!

Other surprises in here include Red Dead Redemption 2 making it back up to Gold (while Grand Theft Auto V hangs out in Silver.) We also note that last year had 2x EA Sports FC games in Gold tier, but this year, the previous-year title (EA Sports FC 25) has slipped into Silver. Also: wow at Baldur’s Gate 3 & Cyberpunk’s staying power…

GTA V is ‘old/new’, thanks to its Enhanced version coming out - confusing!

Next, here’s Silver, which we’re estimating as $40-$75m gross for the year (not bad!) There’s a lot of individual game stories here: we see The Sims 4 moving up from Bronze (evergreen!), as Destiny 2 has a bit of a dethroning (from 3x Plat to Silver.)

There’s also a load of ‘quietly outstanding’ live service grossers, including Ready Or Not, Rust, War Thunder, Rainbow Siege X, and even Once Human. Also: many of the newer F2P winners are Asia-developed and semi-focused, inc. Delta Force (also massive on mobile in China!), Throne and Liberty, Where Winds Meet, Once Human.

Finally, our full document also lists the Bronze tier (#51-100, $20-40m gross), which includes some perma-top grossers like No Man’s Sky, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Rimworld & Crusader Kings III alongside fading-out GaaS hits (like Naraka: Bladepoint & Lost Ark.) It’s a delightful way to see multi-year trends, folks…

PC/console paid marketing: nurturing matters, too

The folks at PC/console marketing measurement & creator campaign firm Gamesight - who measured >$625m in digital marketing spend in 2025 for companies inc. 2K, Bungie, Krafton, etc - just released a new performance marketing report (free reg. req.)

In general, PC/console marketing is starkly trickier to measure than mobile UA. But we appreciate Gamesight for trying to analyze a tough issue which gets hundreds of millions of spend thrown at it! And we def. wanted to highlight the above graph, which is about how to evaluate marketing mix. The suggestion from the team:

  • Last click reporting consistently undervalues upper funnel contributions: “Higher-funnel strategies like YouTube can get overlooked… because their value comes from broad reach and early exposure that can be undervalued in a last click model.”

  • Lower funnel networks are efficient, but rarely self sufficient: “High click networks like TikTok and Discord work as reminders that reinforce intent and convert warm audiences. Low funnel closers like Google Search, Facebook, and Creator / Influencer Traffic finish the job but cannot generate demand on their own.”

Sometimes we feel like ‘a bear of little brain’ when it comes to this level of marketing analysis. But we believe what Gamesight is saying is: people can watch a YouTube ad and internally register that they dig a game, but the trackable metrics can be poor.

But if you optimize your campaign only on high-click ‘calls to action’, there’s a chance you haven’t persuaded the customer that the game is worth buying. Which is why mixing up paid ad sources and not going 100% ‘close-first’ seems empirically sensible.

An example of how Gamesight sees different paid ad sources, funnel-wise.

There are several other discrete pieces of research in the report, including this part excerpted by GI.biz noting that “[Steam player] reviews moving from ‘Mixed’ to ‘Very Positive’ nearly tripled conversion rates [of paid ad campaigns] when features like bug fixes and game patches were implemented.

By comparison… review scores showed ‘no measurable impact’ on conversion rates for free-to-play titles, which it attributed due to there being no cost barrier for players.” (And players not caring much about reviews for F2P games, which can be very based on the ‘tantrum of the moment’, haha.) Anyhow, interesting stuff…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

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