Valve reconfirm the Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Controller are due in 2026

Valve put up their Steam Year In Review 2025 and initially, they made it seem like their hardware plans were a lot more uncertain but they've since clarified.

Thanks to all the AI companies sucking up RAM and storage, with shortages and prices rising we already knew things were going to be a bit bumpy. As Valve announced earlier in February, they can't give pricing or a release date just yet on any of their upcoming devices.

In the initial version of the Steam Year In Review 2025 post, they said "we hope to ship in 2026" which seemed to send the internet and other news sites into a bit of a frenzy over a possible delay. Valve has since edited the post and it now clearly says "we will be shipping all three products this year". So that's that.

However, Valve could still end up deciding to delay the Steam Machine. This one specifically due to the RAM, storage and the GPU becoming less value every month they wait especially if they have to price it higher. The issue isn't so bad for the Steam Frame, since that's filling a very different market and target audience. And the Steam Controller 2 - well, many are excited to grab one regardless.

As for the rest of their yearly review, it goes over things we've reported over the year - all the new stuff Valve has added across Steam including the likes of: new Steam charts, new themed sale events, newer recommendation systems, an overhaul of the discovery queue, the personal release calendar, accessibility notices, the newer search system and so on.

Unfortunately, Valve have not given out any fresh numbers on their monthly or daily active user counts compared to previous years. They did give a very small overview of some data:

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.

All those users are downloading a lot of content. In 2024 we delivered about 80 exabytes to customers, and in 2025 that grew to 100 exabytes. It's hard to make sense of such a huge number, but just for fun: Steam users are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates per day- that's 11.42 petabytes per hour, which is about 190,000 GB of data per minute.

That user growth translates to more revenue for game developers. Since the 2018 announcement of the 75% and 80% revenue share tiers, more and more games from developers big and small have reached new higher revenue share. The revenue share paid out across all non-Valve games on Steam in 2025 was 76%, and that does not include any revenue developers may earn selling free Steam keys outside of Steam. Back in 2024, we shipped a new notification feature for developers to make it more clear when their game has crossed a new revenue share tier, and developers can see a game’s progress towards those higher tiers in their sales reporting.

It was nice to see Valve highlight all their work on Linux / SteamOS and Proton in the post too.