Gabe Newell decided to make Steam after telling the original Half-Life publisher to get lost
Valve launching Steam back in 2004 changed how PC games get distributed almost overnight, and plenty of people rank that decision right up there with Nintendo making Super Mario Bros. and Sony creating the PlayStation....
Valve quietly changed the Steam storefront, and indie developers are seeing traffic increase several times over
Steam discoverability has been a headache for years, with dozens of new releases hitting the storefront daily and making it easy for a lesser-known indie title to vanish. But according to analysts and publishers alike,...
An old video of Gabe Newell explaining why Valve will never become a public company that answers to shareholders has gone viral online
An old clip of Gabe Newell has resurfaced online, showing the Valve boss discussing private company ownership and prioritizing employees over shareholders. The clip feels especially relevant given the wave of layoffs sweeping the tech...
Old SSDs turned into Steam game cartridges, and it works better than it sounds
Digital libraries took away the shelf full of game boxes and replaced it with a list of icons and endless redownloading. The longing for physical media never really went away, though, and sometimes it takes...
Players are unhappy that games without a discount are becoming the main faces of Steam sales
Steam sale banners work on simple logic: the bigger the picture, the deeper the discount. So when a specific title stares back at you from the cover of yet another themed event, your brain automatically...
Gamers crashed Wardogs servers on the very first day of early access – developers partially blame Valve
Wardogs, a 100-player milsim FPS, launched in Steam early access and instantly became a hit. The game topped Steam's global sales chart, and its player count blew past 300,000 concurrent users right away. Not everyone...
Valve requires old CD key from Half-Life 2 to return the player's old account
A Steam account owner whose account was registered more than a decade ago ran into a lockdown over suspicious activity. To prove ownership, he sent Steam Support old email addresses, past passwords, the last four...
Steam brought Valve $15 billion in 2026, with Crimson Desert alone earning $203 million
Valve continues to post record numbers through Steam. According to market analysis from Alinea Analytics lead Rhys Elliott, the platform pulled in roughly $15 billion in gross revenue over the first eight months of 2026...
Nexus Mods bought the fan database SteamDB – its creator burned out from supporting the project
SteamDB, one of the main services for tracking stats, prices and updates on Steam, has changed hands. Founder Pavel Djundik has handed the project over to Nexus Mods, which will take over its development going...
Assassin's Creed Odyssey became the highest-rated game in the series on Steam thanks to Christopher Nolan's new film
Turns out the best advertising a game could ask for showed up in movie theaters. After the premiere of Christopher Nolan's new blockbuster "The Odyssey," Assassin's Creed Odyssey, the eleventh mainline entry in the series,...
Half of paid games on Steam earned less than $3,600, while the top 1% of the most successful releases brought in 85% of the revenue
A new analysis of 99,206 paid games on Steam shows just how polarized the economics of Valve's platform have become. Half the catalogue has earned less than $3,622 over its entire lifetime, while the top...
16 GB of video memory has become the new standard for gamers on Steam
The bar for a "normal" amount of video memory has quietly moved up. Just a couple years ago, 8GB counted as a comfortable minimum for most games, but cards with that same amount are no...
Valve saved the current build of Half-Life: Alyx to a separate branch, and the community is already building theories
A new Steam branch for Half-Life: Alyx called "previous_release" has shown up. Valve locked down the current version of the game separately, which usually happens before major changes hit the main build. The most likely...
UK music rights body sues Valve over unlicensed music on Steam
The Performing Right Society (PRS for Music) has officially commenced legal proceedings against Valve, accusing the company of using its members' musical works on Steam without the proper licensing. According to PRS, music is central...
Daedalic is running a big Steam sale and you can grab Deponia for free
German studio Daedalic Entertainment is running a big Steam sale, and as a headliner, you can grab the first Deponia for free – until March 16. Daedalic was once widely regarded as the rightful heir...
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...
Valve added an x-ray scanner for CS2 cases in Germany, but it's more of a loophole than a fix
Case openings in Counter-Strike 2 have long been compared to slot machines – buying a key in hopes of landing a rare skin isn't all that different from dropping a coin and pulling the lever....
Players spend as much time in Roblox as in PlayStation, Steam, and Fortnite combined
Analyst Matthew Ball's new report revealed the true scale of the Roblox phenomenon – the platform has reached engagement levels that rival the biggest names in gaming. According to the report, by the end of...
Yakuza Kiwami 3 becomes lowest-rated game in the series on Steam due to cut content and controversial casting
Yakuza Kiwami 3, which launched last week and is seemingly the final entry in RGG Studio's Kiwami remake series, has received a mixed reception from players. Despite avoiding widespread review-bombing, the game currently holds the...
Cozy games and titles with solo play options are experiencing rapid growth in popularity on Steam
Analytics platform GameDiscoverCo published research results that revealed the main trend on Steam over the past five years. Analysis of keywords in game descriptions showed an impressive increase in mentions of the term "cozy" –...
