Valve says Steam users downloaded 100 exabytes of games in 2025, and are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates every day

Valve says Steam users downloaded 100 exabytes of games in 2025, and are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates every day | PC Gamer Skip to main content Open menu Close main menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES US Edition UK US Canada Australia Subscribe Sign in View Profile Sign out Search Search PC Gamer Games Hardware News Reviews Guides Video Forum More PC Gaming Show PC Gamer Clips Software Codes Coupons Movies & TV Magazine Newsletter Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine SubscriptionWhy subscribe?Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming magTry a single issue or save on a subscriptionIssues delivered straight to your door or device From$1Subscribe now Don’t miss these Hardware Valve quickly updates its own Steam Machine update, recommitting to a 2026 launch despite AI woes: ‘Nothing’s really changed on our end’ Hardware In the battle for our living rooms, Xbox Project Helix and the Steam Machine make for unlikely rivals on paper—but Microsoft’s new PC gaming-capable console might be raising some eyebrows at Valve Gaming Industry Capcom makes the majority of its sales on PC, and it expects the ‘ratio to continue increasing’ Hardware Valve nixes less confident Steam Machine language, recommits to 2026 release Platforms Steam sale dates: When is the next Steam sale? 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From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we’ve got you covered. Signup + Once a month SFX Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month! Signup + An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter Valve recently published its Steam Year in Review for 2025, which is a big old list of things it has improved on the platform over the year for developers and publishers. Much of it won’t be of particular interest to players, unless you’re gagging to find out how Valve is messing with calendars and recommendations in order to better surface games, but the conclusion has some very big numbers relating to Steam’s users and behaviour. And who doesn’t like a big number?The unsurprising fact is that the platform is seeing “consistent long term growth […] Five years ago, Steam was growing steadily and crossed the 25 million concurrent user mark for the first time. In the years since, we’ve grown at a pace of around 3.4 million additional concurrent users per year, reaching 42 million peak concurrent users.”And all those people are downloading a hell of a lot of stuff, to the extent that today I discovered what an exabyte is. An exabyte is a unit of measurement for data that is equal to 1000 petabytes or one quintillion bytes (that’s a “one” followed by 18 zeroes). It’s so large that it’s a measurement used for things like estimating daily internet traffic, and Wikipedia tells me it would take around a quarter-of-a-million high end home PCs to store this amount of data.Article continues below You may like Steam reportedly raked in a record-breaking $1.6 billion in December with Arc Raiders alone moving over a million copies Steam defies RAM-ageddon and the AI-pocalypse to smash through a new concurrent user record, and I’ll see you back here in like 4 months when it somehow does it again Steam’s 2025 Replay reveals we all once again spent around 14% of our time on games released in the same year—which apparently shakes out to a median of 0.56 new games “In 2024 we delivered about 80 exabytes to customers,” says Valve, “and in 2025 that grew to 100 exabytes. It’s hard to make sense of such a huge