Unsurprisingly Steam Winter Sale was bigger than Steam Summer Sale — it’s expected, of course, as people tend to buy more during Winter holidays, especially when they actually have time to play videogames.

Important note: The following data was gathered using Steam Spy service. Steam Spy estimates ownership of games on Steam using statistical analysis and is not 100% accurate!

Sales volume

At least 46 million copies of games found their new owners during Steam Winter Sale. And it only includes those games that sold over 1,000 copies, as smaller changes are barely detectable by Steam Spy. That’s 50% more compared to Steam Summer Sale.

If we assume that all of those games were sold on Steam (it’s probably not the case because of bundles and third-party stores) and account for regional pricing, we can conclude that Steam Winter Sale brought at least $270M in revenue.

That’s almost twice as much as Steam Summer Sale did.

One of the reasons here is that both Fallout 4 and Grand Theft Auto V were discounted (unlike the last time, when GTA V was force-bundled and then “discounted” to $59.99). Fallout 4 and GTA V are the biggest games on Steam this year in terms of revenue, so both obviously helped.

We also obviously saw many people playing the games, especially the ones outside of top 20.