Valve’s year-end Steam charts for 2025 are a reminder that “big budget” doesn’t automatically mean “biggest money,” because several smaller games managed to generate revenue on the same level as blockbuster releases.
The lists are built around revenue earned (not copies sold), and Valve groups games into tiers rather than giving exact rankings, with titles shown in random order inside each tier.
That structure matters because the takeaway isn’t that one game topped the list, but that these were the highest earners overall, with indie titles appearing alongside the industry’s biggest franchises in 2025.
Valve also notes the chart is preliminary, counting results from January 1 through December 1, with a planned update in early January 2026 to include the rest of December.
Despite the cutoff, the chart highlights consistent trends, with live-service staples leading, shooters and multiplayer games continuing to generate strong revenue, and viral indies reaching the same financial tier as big-publisher titles.
Which Games Were Steam’s Top New Releases of 2025 by Revenue?
Based on Steam’s 2025 New Releases (Platinum tier) chart, the following games were among the highest-earning titles released in 2025. These are listed in random order, as Steam does not publish exact rankings.
- ARC Raiders
- Battlefield 6
- Borderlands 4
- Dune: Awakening
- EA Sports FC 26
- Elden Ring: Nightreign
- Hollow Knight: Silksong
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
- Monster Hunter Wilds
- Schedule I
- Sid Meier’s Civilization VII
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
Schedule I has emerged as one of the most talked-about titles, not because it merely “performed well,” but because it broke into the platform’s top tier despite its lower price point and a development team far smaller than what’s typical for that level of success.
The chart is based on revenue instead of units sold, which makes the placement notable given how many purchases a lower-priced game needs to match full-price titles.
How Do Steam’s “Top Sellers” and “New Releases” Lists Differ?
The charts also highlight how complicated it can be to compare categories without context, because Valve separates “Top Sellers” from “New Releases,” and those lists don’t measure the same thing.
For new releases, Steam uses revenue from a game’s first two weeks on the market, which is why a title can show up strongly there but appear lower on the overall yearly sellers list.
Players in the community were quick to point out that the lists also had different “as of” cutoffs in the preliminary version, which can make comparisons look confusing at first glance.
Still, the launch window chart is useful because it shows which games hit the ground with the most financial momentum, and in 2025 that included major releases like Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6, plus high-profile titles such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Oblivion Remastered.
It also included Hollow Knight: Silksong, which became one of the year’s most notable cases of an “indie-sized” price tag delivering blockbuster-scale revenue.
This is notable because budget-priced games don’t climb these charts without sustained demand and high sales numbers.
Which AAA and Live-Service Games Still Dominated Revenue?
On the AAA side, Steam’s 2025 top earners still contain exactly the names you’d expect to see, especially live-service and long-running competitive giants.
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Titles such as Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Apex Legends, and PUBG remain revenue monsters because they combine player retention with ongoing monetization.
Newer blockbusters also made the cut, even when reception wasn’t spotless. Borderlands 4 and Monster Hunter Wilds were still able to earn heavily despite complaints about optimization or performance issues, showing how hype and franchise pull can translate into sales even when the conversation around quality is mixed.
Steam’s structure also reveals how free-to-play titles can sit comfortably in the top tier, since their revenue comes from spending inside the game rather than box price, which is why something like Marvel Rivals can appear alongside traditional full-priced releases.
Meanwhile, Call of Duty appearing as a single listing highlights a quirk of modern storefront tracking, where franchises grouped under a unified launcher make it difficult to separate how much revenue came from an individual annual release, even when the latest entry drives much of the performance.
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