Steam users downloaded 100 exabytes of games in 2025, averaging 274 petabytes a day

Valve has published its Steam Year in Review for 2025, and alongside the usual rundown of platform improvements for developers and publishers, there are some staggering numbers about user activity and data volumes.

The platform continues to show steady long-term growth. Five years ago, Steam crossed the 25 million concurrent user mark for the first time. Since then, the audience has grown at roughly 3.4 million additional concurrent users per year, reaching a peak of 42 million.

All those people are downloading an enormous amount of data.

"In 2024 we delivered about 80 exabytes to customers," says Valve, "and in 2025 that grew to 100 exabytes."

To put that in perspective – one exabyte equals 1,000 petabytes, or one quintillion bytes (a one followed by 18 zeroes). Storing that much data would require around a quarter of a million high-end home PCs.

Valve broke the numbers down further: Steam users average 274 petabytes of installs and updates per day – that's 11.42 petabytes per hour, or roughly 190,000 GB of data per minute.

On the financial side, Valve said it's paying out more revenue to developers than ever before. Thanks to the tiered revenue share system launched in 2018 (75% and 80% depending on sales volume), "the revenue share paid out across all non-Valve games on Steam in 2025 was 76%, and that does not include any revenue developers may earn selling free Steam keys outside of Steam."