// KOTAKU — GAMING
Here’s What Valve Should Do With The $20 Billion It’s Making This Year
It’s being reported that Valve could be on track to make $20 billion this year from Steam. Claims by Alinea Analytics suggest that Steam made $1.7 billion in September 2026 alone, $5.5 billion in Q3, and $16.5 billion so far this year. And these figures appear to be just from game sales alone, not hardware. So what’s a private company making the same money a year as the entire nation of Madagascar to do with all that cash? We have a few ideas.
Valve has, to its credit, never gone public, meaning the company has never had shareholders to answer to. That also means that all that money and the resulting profit (given they’re private, we have no idea what the company’s outgoings are) gets to stay within or get paid out in dividends. There’s a reason Valve founder Gabe Newell not only owns luxury yachts, but owns a company that makes luxury yachts. The point is, Valve is not short on money, clearly spending nowhere close to the amount that’s coming in.
And let’s be very clear: the vast majority of what’s coming in is money taken from the developers and publishers making and selling the games. 30 percent of every sale on Steam goes directly to Valve, a figure that’s been heavily criticized for many years, but one on which Valve appears immovable. And with 20,000 games launching on Steam every year, and something that could be described as a monopoly on the PC games market, it’s hard not to see such astonishing profits as coming at the expense of tiny independent development teams in ways that are potentially predatory. It’s not unusual, it’s how stores work, but then capitalism is by its very nature predatory. It’s kind of the point. But at the same time, Valve presents itself as something other, something different, and relishes in its moments of altruism or community championing. And, given it’s a private company that depends on the developers who have little choice but to sell on its store, I’d like to see those profits making real change in a very broken industry.
This isn’t about being naive. Clearly the big bosses that Valve lies about not having do exist and want to stay rich, and obviously the company has some astonishing bills to pay. But twenty billion dollars in a year. There’s a fair amount of wiggle room here. So what could Valve do with that cash that would make a real difference?
Many have tried to get Valve to reduce its 30-percent fee, and all have failed. Epic was the most recent big name to have a go, launching the Epic Games Store with its 12-percent cut that now only kicks in after a game has made its first million dollars. Which means, for the majority of indie developers, the store is essentially free to use. The downside is, you also don’t sell many copies because few people buy anything from the Epic Games Store other than Fortnite. For many years, developers would go there not because of the better sales deal, but because Epic would (and the company has never acknowledged this, but I’ve been tipped off by plenty of developers) sometimes pay the entire development budget of your game if you gave them a year’s exclusivity over Steam. It would be ludicrous to turn down a deal like that, and the option has extended the lives of many an indie studio to a second or third game. But those good times are over, as this year Epic laid off 1,000 employees, and Epic itself says that profits from the store are “low.”
But there’s a middle ground. And it’s one that Valve has not only never explored, but actively rejected in the most disgraceful way. In 2018 the company announced that all games would be charged 30 percent until they made $10 million. After that, the cut would be reduced to 25 percent, and then down to 20 percent at $50 million. So the way the store operates is that the smallest games get charged the largest fees, while the most outstandingly successful AAA games hand over less and less the more money they make. What?
Clearly, given that the bulk of Valve’s profits are certainly not coming from the 30