Steam's ancient behemoths face increased competition from new games in the store's 2025 money-making rankings

Shhh, don't shout about it too much, you'll awaken the aged power of, er, Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring

Right, get ready for some chatter about where the contents of our collective wallets have gone over the past year. Valve's list of the highest-grossing games on Steam in 2025 has emerged from the great mists, and in a nice revelation, features a larger number of fresh releases than last year's ranking. That's alongside all of the moderately to quite old stuff which more folks keep hopping on the train of with every passing 12 month period.

This data's been dissected, shared, and otherwise spreadsheeted by GameDiscoverCo in their latest newsletter. The big news is that of the top 100 highest grossers, 31 were new games - that meaning games released in 2025 or 2024 in this case. Fresh games made up 24 of the 100 spots in last year's version of this ranking, so things have trended marginally newer.

"It’s possible that 2025 was just a super-strong year for new games," GameDiscoverCo boffin Simon Carless wrote of potential explanations for this shift. "It’s also possible that with more and more ‘catalog games’ being sold cheaply on discount, sorting by revenue will favour $60 newcomers & viral hits (vs. games at 25-50% of the price that still do good ‘long tail’.) It’s probably...a combo of these things?"

As for the new games which made the cut, Valve split these rankings into four tiers of moneyness - platinum, gold, silver, and bronze. Platinum's the top ranking, with seven of its 12 this year meeting the new game requirements. Those were Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Arc Raiders, Monster Hunter Wilds, Marvel Rivals, and Battlefield 6, plus viral hits Schedule 1 and REPO. There's also Call of Duty, which technically counts as new thanks to Activision's switch to dishing out its latest shootering via an app. The remaining four platinumers are Dota 2, Counter-Strike 2, PUBG and Apex Legends, all of which have shot their way to defending the honour of the non-brand new games.

Moving down to gold tier, you find newbies Borderlands 4, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Split Fiction, Elden Ring Nightreign, Oblivion Remastered, and EA Sports FC 26. They're hanging out with a number of other well-established big hitters - your Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3. Warframe and Dead By Daylight are also in that club, proving their staying power. The tier below that, silver is home to Hollow Knight: Silksong and Dispatch, while Hades 2's nestled in bronze. Taking a glance at the list of most played Steam Deck games, both Silksong and Hades 2 have vaulted straight into the platinum section this year.

As Carless eludes to, pinning down exactly what's caused this year's shifts is complicated, but the wider trend at least appears to suggest the continued strangulation of folks' ability to spend on new games without worrying they might suddenly need that money because they've been laid off isn't pushing things even more starkly away from newer games which're usually more pricey than their older brethren.

Then again, the fact Steam's free of Fortnite and Roblox - two perennial stalwarts of lists like these for other platforms - is probably helping make that sunny assessment easier to reach.