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Steam :: Steamworks Development :: Steam Year In Review 2024
At the end of every year, our team looks back at the features we shipped and the problems we solved. We summarize that work for the developers and publishers of PC games.
For years we’ve seen an encouraging pattern. Hit new releases are excellent at generating new first-time purchasers, and we’ve tried to build many platform features to encourage those new users to stick around, find more great games, and play with friends. To gather data illustrating the effectiveness of that approach, we went all the way back to 2023 and identified the biggest 20 releases of that year. We looked at every new first-time purchaser generated by those products (that is, an account making a purchase, or redeeming a Steam key, for the first time) for a total of 1.7 million new users. Then we followed that cohort of new users. The stats below represent what those players did from January 2024 through early March 2025.
The 1.7 million customers who originated from a top 2023 release went on to enjoy more than 141 million hours of playtime in additional games, on top of any playtime from the game that brought them onboard. And they weren’t just playing games—they were buying new ones, too. That cohort of players has gone on to spend $20 million on in-game transactions across hundreds of other games—plus another $73 million on premium games and DLC across thousands more products.
That kind of follow-through is why we believe our platform efforts are so important. Steam isn’t just a storefront—it provides social community, game discoverability, interactive events, and a deep set of game-enhancing features to attract and retain players who will be checking out new games in the future.
On that note, we also wanted to use this Year In Review to talk about the opportunity for new products. 2024 was the Steam platform's best year ever in terms of customers buying newly released games.
Developers and publishers already have some insight into what games are being bought and played thanks to Steam Charts, our publicly visible resource to see top-selling and most-played games over time, but here's some additional data about new releases.
For the purposes of this discussion, we’re defining New Release revenue as gross revenue from the first 30 days following a product’s release, plus pre-purchase revenue (if any). For clarity, a game is only counted once. If a game launched into Early Access, we use that initial Early Access date rather than a future 1.0 date. Some major takeaways:
- New Release revenue per year has increased almost exactly 10x since 2014.
- In 2024, more than 500 new titles exceeded $250,000 in New Release revenue (up 27% from 2023).
- In 2024, more than 200 new titles exceeded $1 million in New Release revenue (up 15% from 2023).
2024 was a remarkable year for new releases, but that success is part of a trend stretching back many years, as we continue to create more opportunity for developers launching new titles.
Another way to look at the opportunity on Steam is in terms of regional reach. Because Steam is a unified global platform, developers from one region can quickly and easily access customers in other regions. For many years we’ve worked to expand server infrastructure, payment methods, language support, and developer outreach to new territories. Those efforts allow developers to find users all over the world, and of course users in that region have a much better experience using the platform. So how does that look in practice?
In 2024, one of the most successful launches from a first-time Steam dev was TCG Card Shop Simulator, released by Malaysian studio OPNeon. A solo dev from a territory that makes up only 0.5% of global traffic on Steam, OPNeon launched the game in September of 2024 and found well over a million customers in its first month. Best of all, the audience for the game reflects Steam’s worldwide reach. In alphabetical order, the game’s 10 biggest regions by units are Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Pakistan, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
And remember those new users we mentioned above—the ones who made their first purchase on a top new release in 2023 and stuck around to buy more games? About 10,000 of them went on to buy TCG Card Shop Sim!
And lots of other studios are finding a worldwide audience, too. For another example, we looked at Until Then, a narrative adventure from Filipino studio Polychroma Games and publisher Maximum Entertainment. Polychroma's first game on Steam, Until Then focused a unique lens on Filipino culture and experiences. But the game found success far beyond the Philippines, selling 92% of its units outside of its home country in 2024.
Polychroma and OPNeon are just two examples of many that highlight Steam's global reach (and thanks to both studios for giving us permission to share these details!) In 2024, about a quarter of our monthly top new releases, announced publicly on Steam Charts, were from devs releasing their first game on Steam-- and those devs hailed from dozens of different countries.
We’re especially excited by these kinds of success stories because we know they weren’t feasible for devs in many regions in the past. It took years of investments in self-publishing tools, local currency support, localized documentation, and regional outreach to create these opportunities for studios that may have been unlikely to release a game on PC at all, much less find customers on other continents. All of that opportunity is built on top of translating the store UI into dozens of languages, expanding our content delivery network, onboarding new payment methods, and giving developers direct access to all our APIs and tools without friction or gatekeeping.
Best of all, we know that when a successful game from an emerging territory is able to generate revenue from a worldwide audience, that inspires more talented creators and supports future investment in the games industry.
