Steam ranks its best selling games for 2025, with AAA and indie surprises making the charts

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made headlines at The Game Awards, but it didn’t earn the most revenue on one key marketplace. Steam has released charts showing the best selling games for 2025. Despite rocky launches, gamers see some resilient AAA titles on the list. Several indie games with significantly lower budgets also managed to compete.

For its top sellers chart, Valve considered sales data and DLC purchases from January 1st to December 1st. It plans to update the list again in early January 2026 to include December figures. While the site doesn’t assign specific ranks to the Steam games, the Platinum group includes the 12 most lucrative performers over the past year.

Top 12 sellers on Steam for 2025 (in random 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

Marvel Rivals joins free-to-play stalwarts like Apex Legends and Dota 2 on the rankings. Counter-Strike 2 continues to entice large audiences, but newer shooter games may draw more attention. Borderlands 4 was met with widespread criticism on its release date for subpar optimization. Mixed user ratings didn’t stop the Gearbox Software project from generating significant revenue.

Even though Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6 debuted in Q4, they find themselves part of the Platinum contenders. The Call of Duty entry consists of several different releases in the series. Still, the Black Ops 7 retail performance may not be as disappointing as first predicted. Nevertheless, the triumphant extraction shooter Arc Raiders has boasted the most steady participation.

2025 may be the year of the Steam indies

Monster Hunter Wilds is another AAA game that capitalized on a strong start before performance woes slowed its momentum. Titles without high price tags are also among the best selling Steam games. Schedule 1 and R.E.P.O were popular attractions for streamers, who gave the indie games valuable exposure.

The site also published charts for the top 12 new releases for 2025. For this section, Valve tracked the revenue over each game’s first two weeks on the market. Here, gamers see Hollow Knight: Silksong, which only placed in the Silver group for overall best sellers. Meanwhile, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Oblivion Remastered are two RPGs that stormed out of the gates with high player counts.

Needless to say, it’s been another very profitable year for Valve. In addition to breaking records for concurrent player counts, it also earned an all-time record yearly total revenue of $17.7 billion.