 |
| Best selling games on Steam for 2025 banner is shown |
The gaming world is still buzzing from the surprises at The Game Awards, where Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took home significant honors. However, when it comes to the raw financial battlefield of PC gaming, a different story is told by the year's sales charts. Valve has unveiled its official Steam best sellers of 2025, painting a picture of a marketplace where established franchises demonstrate incredible resilience, while a handful of indie games punch far above their weight.
The rankings, which you can explore for yourself via the official Steam Year in Review charts, are based on total revenue—including game sales and DLC—from January 1st to December 1st, 2025. Valve notes a final update will come in early January to include the crucial holiday month. The top tier, known as the Platinum group, showcases the 12 highest revenue-generating titles of the year, listed in no particular order.
The Platinum Powerhouses: Familiar Faces and Surprising Contenders
The list is a mix of evergreen live-service giants and the latest blockbuster releases:
- Counter-Strike 2
- Arc Raiders
- PUBG Battlegrounds
- Borderlands 4
- Marvel Rivals
- R.E.P.O.
- Monster Hunter Wilds
- Apex Legends
- Dota 2
- Schedule 1
- Call of Duty
- Battlefield 6
A few stories immediately leap out. The free-to-play model continues to dominate, with Marvel Rivals successfully joining stalwarts like Apex Legends and Dota 2. Despite its rocky launch plagued by optimization issues and mixed reviews, Borderlands 4 proved that the Gearbox Software looter-shooter formula still has a massive, spending-ready audience.
Interestingly, two late-year releases, Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6, managed to sprint into the Platinum tier despite their Q4 debut. Meanwhile, the Call of Duty franchise's presence, likely bolstered by the latest Black Ops installment, suggests its retail performance may have exceeded early, pessimistic forecasts. Among shooters, industry watchers note that the "triumphant extraction shooter" Arc Raiders has shown the most consistent player engagement since its arrival.
 |
| Best selling games on Steam for 2025 are shown |
2025: The Year Indies Broke Through the Ceiling
While AAA titles with $70 price tags commanded attention, the most compelling narrative of Steam's 2025 is the undeniable success of independent games. Titles like Schedule 1 and R.E.P.O., with significantly lower budgets, found themselves competing directly with industry titans. Their secret weapon? Explosive popularity on streaming platforms like Twitch, where charismatic streamers gave these unique experiences invaluable exposure and fueled word-of-mouth sales.
This trend is further highlighted in Steam's separate "Top New Releases" chart, which ranks games by revenue in their first two weeks on sale. Here, we see phenomena like Hollow Knight: Silksong—which only reached the Silver tier for the overall year—making a massive splash at launch. Similarly, RPGs like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Oblivion Remastered stormed out of the gates with huge player counts, proving the enduring demand for deep, single-player experiences.
Even major releases weren't immune to challenges. Monster Hunter Wilds, for instance, capitalized on a massively strong start but saw its momentum tempered as players reported performance woes on certain PC configurations.
A Record-Breaking Year for Valve
Ultimately, 2025 has been another extraordinarily profitable year for Valve. Beyond breaking concurrent player records repeatedly, the platform has reportedly reached an all-time high in yearly revenue, estimated at a staggering $17.7 billion. This figure underscores Steam's entrenched position as the dominant storefront for PC gaming—a ecosystem where a game can win awards on one night, and an entirely different set can quietly count their profits, proving that on Steam, success comes in many forms.