Valve has released new figures on Steam – and they show how gigantic the platform has become. Players downloaded over 100 Exabytes of games, updates, and data in 2025.
What data has Valve presented exactly? In its annual retrospective on Steam, Valve published new statistics alongside numerous updates. It shows that platform users downloaded a total of about 100 Exabytes of data in 2025.
This continues a trend that has already become apparent in recent years. In 2024, the total download traffic was around 80 Exabytes according to Valve (Annual Report 2024).
Data Volumes in Comparison
How large is this data volume really? The number initially sounds abstract, as very few people encounter such large units as Exabytes in their daily lives. One Exabyte equals one billion Gigabytes.
On average, Steam players download about 274 Petabytes of installations and updates daily according to Valve. That corresponds to more than eleven Petabytes per hour. Even per minute, the data amounts are still around 190,000 GB.
1 Petabyte consists of 1,024 TB and is a number with 15 zeros. In daily life, you would normally never encounter such a huge number. 1 Exabyte has even 18 zeros, making it even larger. As a comparison: One million only has 6 zeros.
For comparison: The entire global internet traffic amounts to between 17 and 33 Exabytes of data daily according to various network analyses (IbisWorld & economyinsights & AppologicNetworks). This means: Steam alone already generates a significant share of what is transmitted worldwide over the internet every day.
Even compared to large internet nodes, the number seems enormous. At DE-CIX in Frankfurt, one of the largest internet nodes in the world, data volumes of similar dimensions are handled daily. There, peak values reach several hundred Petabytes per day – a range that also includes the daily international Steam downloads (Ip-Insider).
Another comparison shows how many games could be behind this data volume (the report does not clearly indicate whether other tools and software from Valve were also included): Most AAA titles today are 100 Gigabytes or larger. A good example is GTA V (Enhanced Edition) with about 105 GB download volume (Steam). If only games of this size were downloaded, 100 Exabytes would theoretically correspond to about a billion complete game installations.
Why are downloads on Steam growing so rapidly? Five years ago, Steam first surpassed the mark of 25 million simultaneous active users. Since then, according to the platform’s data, the number has increased by about 3.4 million annually and now reaches peaks of about 42 million simultaneous active users. The download figure has also increased significantly from 80 Exabytes in 2024 (Steam).
The strong increase in numbers is mainly due to the development of the platform itself. Steam is now considered the largest internet distribution platform for PC gaming worldwide and offers tens of thousands of games. At the same time, the games themselves are getting larger.
The new figures show how large Steam has actually become. Behind this success is primarily one person: Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve and to this day the face of the company. The developer built Steam in the early 2000s: But who is Newell actually? MeinMMO explains the details about the well-known personality.
