Valve has unveiled its Steam best sellers list for 2025, and the results are a reminder that critical acclaim doesn’t always translate into top revenue. While award-season favorites captured plenty of headlines, Steam’s biggest money-makers this year included a mix of long-running multiplayer giants, newly launched AAA releases, and surprisingly strong indie breakouts that punched far above their budgets.
Steam’s 2025 best-selling rankings are based on revenue, factoring in game sales and DLC purchases from January 1 through December 1. Valve says the chart will be refreshed in early January 2026 to account for December performance. Instead of publishing a strict 1-to-12 order, Steam groups the year’s top earners into tiers, with the Platinum tier representing the 12 highest-earning games on the platform during that period.
Here are the Platinum-tier top 12 best-selling Steam games for 2025 (listed in no particular order):
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
One of the biggest takeaways from Steam’s 2025 best sellers list is just how dominant shooters and competitive multiplayer games remain. Free-to-play mainstays like Apex Legends and Dota 2 continue to generate massive revenue, helped by large player bases and ongoing monetization. Counter-Strike 2 also stays firmly in the spotlight, showing that Valve’s flagship shooter still pulls in huge audiences even as fresh competition arrives throughout the year.
Marvel Rivals landing in the top tier is another sign that players are consistently willing to invest time and money in live-service experiences that keep delivering new content. At the same time, 2025 also proved that launch-day criticism doesn’t automatically block a game from financial success. Borderlands 4, for example, faced complaints about optimization and drew mixed reactions from users, yet it still managed to perform as one of Steam’s biggest revenue generators.
Late-year launches also made a serious impact. Despite arriving in Q4, both Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6 still earned enough to reach the Platinum group. And while “Call of Duty” represents multiple entries across the franchise rather than a single standalone release, it remained a major revenue driver on Steam. There’s also a note of optimism around Black Ops 7, which appears to have performed better at retail than early expectations suggested.
Indie games were also one of the year’s defining stories on Steam. Lower-priced titles like Schedule 1 and R.E.P.O. climbed into Steam’s top-earning tier by building momentum through community hype and streamer exposure. In a year packed with blockbusters, these indie hits proved they can compete in the same revenue conversation when visibility, replayability, and word-of-mouth align.
Monster Hunter Wilds represents another familiar 2025 trend: a huge launch fueled by anticipation, followed by performance concerns that cooled some of its momentum. Even so, its early strength was enough to carry it into the year’s highest-earning group.
Valve also released a separate Steam chart for the 12 top new releases of 2025, calculated differently from the overall yearly best sellers. That list tracks revenue for each title’s first two weeks after release, highlighting games that came out of the gate fast. In those new-release rankings, titles like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Oblivion Remastered stood out for strong early player counts. Meanwhile, Hollow Knight: Silksong appeared lower on the overall annual best sellers list, landing in the Silver tier rather than among the year’s biggest revenue earners.
Beyond which games topped the charts, Steam itself had a landmark year. Valve not only continued to post record-breaking concurrent player counts, but it also reportedly reached an all-time high in annual revenue, totaling $17.7 billion. Between blockbuster releases, resilient live-service staples, and indie breakouts driven by creators and communities, Steam’s 2025 best-selling games list captures a platform that continues to grow—and a marketplace where revenue leaders don’t always match the year’s most decorated titles.
