Report: Steam Winter Sale grossed twice as much as Summer Sale (update)

Online tool Steam Spy has the data on just how much money the Steam Winter Sale generated, which concluded last week. The full rundown is compiled and detailed by Steam Spy founder Sergey Galyonkin in a post on Medium, in which he breaks down the revenue generated by the recent Steam Winter Sale.

According to Galyonkin, customers purchased at least 46 million copies of games during the sales period, which he calculates to be a minimum of $270 million in revenue. That's twice the gross of last year's Summer Sale, he wrote, which concluded in June 2015 and was the service's first major test of its own efficacy.

He attributed the massive uptick in sales to the discounts major titles Fallout 4 and Grand Theft Auto 5 received during the December discounts. Those games landed in the number one and two spots on the list, respectively, with Fallout 4 taking in $13.9 million and GTA5 making $10.9 million.

For comparison: The highest grossing game back in June was Ark: Survival Evolved, which took in $10.4 million; its next closest competitor for the top slot, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, made $6.1 million.

The top 15 highest earners were as follows, according to Steam Spy's data.

Check out the rest of the stats-heavy post for more takeaways synthesized by the Steam analyst, including a comparison of time spent gaming during the Winter Sale versus the Summer Sale and a discussion of the average discounts offered.

Recently, Galyonkin published his breakdown of Steam's overall 2015 sales figures. According to data culled from publicly available information, he found that Valve's platform had grossed $3.5 billion last year.

Update: Valve has published official stats of its own on its Winter Sale success. While the publisher didn't reveal official sales figures, it did compile graphs showing an increase in product page views and wishlist additions over the sales period. Interestingly, the stats were meant to only be shared with developers, but are now publicly available.