Steam hits record $1.7 billion in September 2026 despite soaring PC hardware costs

Steam hits record $1.7 billion in September 2026 despite soaring PC hardware costs

Kunal Khullar Social Links Navigation News Contributor Kunal Khullar is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. He is a long time technology journalist and reviewer specializing in PC components and peripherals, and welcomes any and every question around building a PC.

Jame5 It's like nobody can afford new hardware, so they are spending their disposable income on software to make the most of what they already have. Wild how that works. >.> Reply

ggeeoorrggee Jame5 said: It's like nobody can afford new hardware, so they are spending their disposable income on software to make the most of what they already have. Wild how that works. >.> Not to mention Steam has a wealth of AAA titles that are old enough to run on the hardware people have or can afford. The soaring cost of hardware has opened my eyes to the wealth of great games I missed that are now also 20% – 80% less costly. Reply

bill001g Although making more money is a number to brag about the number of games being sold is not so much. Steam always had massive amounts of trash. That has massively increased in the last year or so because of all the AI slop games. You have some indi game maker be successful with some new game concept and you have a large amounts of AI copies within days. Most these games are pretty simple compare to the AAA games. This allows them to be quickly duplicated likely before the original company made much money. The problem is they can't copyright the general concept of their game. Popular games always had copies but it was much more effort when a human had to code them. Reply

ezst036 Good, that is more money that will get plowed back into the Linux ecosystem. Reply

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