this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026
305 points (98.4% liked)
PC Gaming
15573 readers
975 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Captain: the figure is gross revenue, profit margin is ~40%
Hardware is more no?
Profit on hardware in this economy?
Somebody is, it's just not Valve.
TSMC and the memory foundries
Profit margin is company wide metric, calculated from financial statements. It includes all the products&services company produces
They don’t release financial statements, that 40% is entirely fabricated lol. Everything is estimates, it’s stated only about 100 times in the link.
Hardware has higher profit ratio, it’s not 40%. Most is 30% from game sales, but hardware is almost 100%. That average is not even an estimate, it’s completely made up dude. It’s not 40%, I was asking them a question so the would rethink or provide the source, but clearly people believe the fake data they presented.
There’s absolutely no way it’s only 40%. Games alone are 30% for third party, their own games is close to 100%. So those two alone average far over 40% and that’s not including hardware that’s almost solely profit.
Profit margin % means share of revenue you get to keep after all the expenses
Example: Say a game sold for 100€, revenue of valve is 30€, valve expenses on that sale is 18€, so actual profit is 12€.
Data of private companies isn't required to published regularly but same as in the article, it can be voluntarily shared by the company.
Calling it fabricated implies accounting fraud, which is serious legal offense (equivalent of accusing a person of murder). So, being skeptical of the numbers is a good investor mindset but throwing baseless accusations is punishable offense in itself
Let's be civil, people
I think they're saying you came up with that 40% number yourself. Did steam ever reveal that info?
I didn't do any original sophisticated research since my interest in the story is very low, so i reposted the figure from literally Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation (Search page by "profit margin")
Huh Steam only accounts for 60% of their revenue? Amazing.
Almost 100%? Are you saying it costs, quite literally, basically nothing to make hardware?
Source?