Alinea Analytics reports Steam’s $1.7 billion revenue is its strongest yet for the month of September, and all-new games are riding high.
2026 has been another rough year in a lot of ways, with many companies facing layoffs and reductions. Offering a spot of potential good news, gaming analysts Alinea Analytics has just delivered its latest sales estimates for Steam, and it suggests that the Valve store's total revenue for the past month marks its "best September to date." What's also quite reassuring is that among the top-ranking new releases, there are some completely fresh names leading the way.
Alinea's estimate puts Steam's total revenue for September 2026 at $1.7 billion, which reporter Rhys Elliott notes is 13% higher than the previous record-holder for the month, September 2025. Elliott then digs in deeper on the 500 top-grossing games, which he says account "for about three-quarters of September's revenue." While approximately 79.5% of it came from established franchises, 20.5% belonged to new IPs.
Among those fresh names are two of the three biggest new releases for the month, multiplayer game Wardogs at an estimated $86.9 million, and single-player RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker at $26.9 million. Given the industry's tendencies towards safe, established series, I'm personally very pleased to see complete newcomers performing so well. The third was Onimusha: Way of the Sword, which might be an old name in the industry but still feels like more of a surprising comeback than the likes of a new Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed.
As Elliott's report continues, there's plenty more variety to be found among the other big monthly successes that fall into the bucket of 'premium games' (those with an up-front price tag). Alongside EA Sports FC 27 and Control Resonant, both of which arrived relatively late in the month, you'll find the likes of Bodycam, which saw a huge spike thanks to its recent 'Locked and Loaded' update, and ridiculous viral co-op game How to Fish.
Naturally, free-to-play still does extremely well. Alinea estimates that free Steam games accounted for 25.6% of monthly revenue among that top 100, despite being only 16% of the list. In particular, the big heavy hitters of Counter-Strike 2, PUBG, Dota 2, and Apex Legends combined to almost $168 million, "nearly 10% of Steam's entire revenue for the month."
It's worth the caveat that these are estimates rather than confirmed figures, although Alinea's reporting has traditionally been fairly accurate, and many of the big stats here are based on sales numbers given by publishers. Nevertheless, seeing continued success for new series both at a small-scale indie level and for bigger, more ambitious projects like The Blood of Dawnwalker is somewhat reassuring in a time of ever-more uncertainty. It's also one more reason for me to tell you to play Dawnwalker; it's really very good.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/september-sales-report-alinea
