Watch - Valve's GDC 2026 talk on how they're helping developers succeed on PC

Valve went along to GDC Festival of Gaming 2026 to give a talk titled "Steam Platform 2026: How Valve is Helping Game Developers Succeed on PC Gaming".

For those of us who didn't attend GDC, you do at times miss some really interesting talks - with this being one of them. Thankfully, it was recorded and is now available to easily view on YouTube. While this talk is aimed at developers, it's still a nice little peak behind the curtains on how Valve think and operate for us normal people.

The talk is presented by Tom Giardino (Steam Business) and Kaci Aitchison Boyle (Steam Team / Communications).

One bit that's interesting on how Valve operate is that they're not chasing the trend of always making their numbers go up like publicly traded companies since Valve is a private company and has more long-term thinking. So no shareholders, no advertisers and Aitchison Boyle did mention very clearly they have no "paid placements of any kind" - so those big new release banners you see on Steam appear to be their own picks.

Another bit they touched on is how developers worry about the ever-increasing amount of games releasing on Steam, and of course they're extremely aware of that - but noted how the number of players on Steam is always increasing too so the market for games is getting bigger. Giardino also mentioned how each year the number of games hitting $100K+ has been increasing, and that matches up with other revenue marks like the number of games hitting $500K+ or $1M+ each year also rising. Giardino mentioned the overall trend of it increasing each year for developers has been "really consistent there".

Plenty more was talked about - worth a watch. The full video can be viewed below:

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The next GDC will be in March 1-5, 2027.