The takeaway: While Valve spent much of its Steam Year in Review 2025 post discussing its hardware plans for 2026, the company also included a brief update on its total data usage. Combining the new information with figures from Valve's prior annual reports reveals that Steam's data delivery has likely grown more than 10-fold over the past decade.

Valve confirmed that its storefront exceeded 100 exabytes (100 million terabytes) last year and disclosed for the first time that it delivered 80 exabytes to users in 2024. The figures include game installs and updates.

Breaking the numbers down further, Valve calculates that users are currently averaging approximately 274 petabytes (274,000 TB) per day, 11.42 petabytes per hour, and 190 TB per minute. Although 2023 data is unavailable, comparing prior charts reveals significant growth each year since 2020.

Steam delivered 15.9 exabytes in 2018, and while 2019 saw the service's flattest growth rate on record, it reached 25.2 exabytes in 2020. The number grew by over 30 percent each year thereafter, reaching 32.9 exabytes in 2021 and 44.7 exabytes in 2022.

Determining the factors behind Steam's acceleration post-2020 could prove difficult. The video game industry surged alongside the tech sector during the pandemic, but sales have since leveled off, while Valve's data-delivery growth has not. Other potential causes include the steadily rising number of games released on Steam each year, with ever-larger install sizes. While PC games approaching or exceeding 100 GB were not unheard of before 2020, the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles that year likely pushed the average sizes of AAA titles upward.

Valve also addressed its controversial 30% revenue cut. In 2018, the company reduced its share to 25% and 20% for more successful games, and it revealed that its combined cut last year was only 24%. However, Valve did not disclose the proportion of titles that qualified for more generous revenue splits.

Steam's 2025 Year in Review report received plenty of attention due to its most worrying detail: the release dates for the upcoming Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller 2 have grown more vague. Last year, Valve originally planned to launch the devices in the first quarter of 2026, but ongoing RAM shortages extended the window to the first half of this year. Now, the company simply aims to release them this year, likely at a higher price than initially intended.