Steam's chart was designed to communicate that more games than ever are seeing revenue of over $100,000 per year. This, were it so clear cut, would be splendid news. According to the chart, in 2020 just 3,000 games "earned" $100k, but by 2025 that number had reached 5,863. Let's call it 6,000 for ease. That means twice as many games are hitting this figure compared to five years ago.
January is often a quiet month for big video game releases. So this cold, wintry month becomes a perfect time to evaluate your ever-growing backlog of video games and start chipping away at it. That's what many of us at Kotaku are doing right now, and so we figured hey, let's turn our lives into content for the website. Welcome to the start of Backlog Week, a way to celebrate, critically evaluate, and document those massive lists of games we all have.
A common response to negative reviews, no matter the subject, goes something like this: 'Well, what would you do to fix this?' Normally, I would answer this with some kind of rude joke about how the purpose of criticism is not to tell you how to fix your sink, or capitalism. I leave that work to the YouTubers. But this time, I'll make an exception. I will tell you what I am doing to fix all this. The answer is: Nothing.
December 2025 was a record-breaking month for Steam, with approximately $1.6 billion in gross revenue during the holiday season. While that success is shared among several games, the big winner of the holidays was Arc Raiders.
