Steam's Winter Sale is now over, and according to the latest report from Alinea Analytics, PC players are going to be spending their time playing ARC Raiders while they wait for the next store-wide sale for the platform this Spring.
December 2025 was the best December for Steam yet, with the platform generating over $1.6 billion last month. It was a 22.7% increase compared to December 2024, and it handily beat December 2020's COVID-era numbers when Steam brought in a gross revenue of $1.4 billion.
As for what drove that record-breaking gross revenue? ARC Raiders, the third-person extraction shooter from Embark Studios that continues to be the 'game of the hour' after its massive launch in October 2025, was a big part of that success. Since it hit the market, it has barely slowed down, just recently having reached over 12 million copies sold overall. On Steam alone, Alinea estimates it has sold over 7 million copies.
Over the holidays, ARC Raiders was the second-best-selling game on Steam by revenue. It sold over 250K copies on Boxing Day, and its concurrent player counts show no sign of the game leaving the top-played games on Steam anytime soon. At the time of this writing, it has yet to fall below 250K concurrent players on Steam since it launched.
As for which game took the number one spot in terms of revenue, that went to Counter-Strike, which is what you'd expect from the game that constantly remains the most played game on the platform.
The charts for Steam's December 2025 get more interesting when you look at copies sold, as they directly point out the value of a good deal. Detroit: Become Human was 90% off during the Winter Sale, making it less than the price of a latte at Starbucks. At that price, approximately 993K players who hadn't bought it before took their chance, and it was the second-best-selling game, behind ARC Raiders, for December 2025.
Other notable entries on the chart include Battlefield 6, which was 30% off during the Winter Sale, and Slay the Spire, which was also at an all-time low at 90% off during the Winter Sale. Good timing for developer Mega Crit, which is getting prepared to launch Slay the Spire II later this year, in March 2026.
When ARC Raiders arrived in October 2025, Wccftech's Kai Tatsumoto gave it a 9/10 in his review, writing, "All in all, ARC Raiders is a phenomenal entry in the growing loot-and-scoot genre, or extraction shooter if you want to be more technical about it. While the gunplay suffers in the early stages with inferior tier one weaponry, it shines through once you start developing squad tactics and learn the ins and outs of besting the array of lethal ARC threats throughout Toledo. I wanted to wait until the first major content push from Embark Studios before finalizing my thoughts, and the inclusion of Stella Montis has brought a new flavor of psychological warfare to escalate this extraction shooter to greater heights."
For more on ARC Raiders, you can check out all of our coverage of the game here.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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