Inspired by true events from this morning
For context: I make indie games and have released two so far and I’m currently working on the third one which is weird as fuck. So the way that Steam works is, they don’t send you money anytime you make a sale, but they send all of it at the end of every month. Now September is almost over and I got an e-mail titled “Steam Payment Notification” and I get all hyped up. I open it and read it that the Payment Notification is actually that there is no Payment since I didn’t make $100 in sales. Way to hype me up and bring me down, Steam.
Youtube and twitch work this same way. When I was starting there were months where I didnt make any money because I didn’t meet the minimum. Hoping next month meets the requirement for you boss 🙏
Does the balance at least accumulate until you do hit the threshold, or is the money just gone?
It accumulates, so there is no money lost. It does kinda suck though that as you start, even though you can make money and did make a bit you don’t get to see it yet
Other games include “be a rock” and “pizza synthwave” and this is the weird one.
Wish listed.
I see you settled on a design for the toaster. Love the mustache.
Does Steam take a cut for distribution?
If not, while this emotionally sucks, they’ve a solid operational policy.
Yes, their cut is 30% which is a lot, but they are pretty much the only big platform out there. Epic games has been trying to get in the game but so far they are not close. Their cut is 15%.
I want to note that you’d need about $143 in gross sales to meet the threshold of $100 in net profit.
On the surface that sounds like a lot. But, they’re providing a service without any guarantee of any income. Epic can only compete because they’ve few users and are willing to operate at a near loss in attempt to garner market share.
This will be a difficult one for others to understand as a “good deal”. Gamers are usually correct when they pull out their pitchforks. This should not be one of those times.
While I’m no fan of Epic Games for bribing companies to keep games off of Steam for a year or more, Valve’s market dominance in PC game sales isn’t a good thing for developers or consumers.
I released a game like three years ago and it’s earned $97 in that time.
I feel your pain
Buy it yourself, get over 100, cash out
Haha, I’ve considered it. I’d really like to at least be able to buy pizza for the gang who helped make the game.
Which game is it?
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Thank you all so much for your interest! :)
The game is called Shoot Your Friends. It’s a death match couch game for 2-4 players who share a screen and pilot tanks around an arena.
Please be aware that it is somewhat niche, it’s only compatible with controllers and local multiplayer. But if you ever get the gang over for game night it can be a fun way to spend the evening.
shoot your friends
Done. Will you now tell me what it’s called?
Tell us the game now.
Concord
If you roughly convert your hourly salary, how much money did you spend working on this game?
If we were to compare it to our day jobs, the opportunity cost for the team and me would probably be around ten grand.
If we compare the time spent to the money earned, then we’re each worth several cents an hour.
It’s a good thing I didn’t get into game dev for the money, it seems I’m quite bad at it
Revenue divided by time is a depressing metric for anyone who starts trying to monetize their hobby, but that’s not the point. Do your fun project because it’s fun. If you make enough to cash out on Steam, get yourselves some actual trophies. Or pizza. Trying to make money will force you to do all the depressing capitalist things the big studios do, and then it’s not fun anymore.
Hey me too! I released my first game on Steam a month ago and by all objective measures it was a flop, but as a hobbyist I’m still proud of it. It honestly did better than I thought for a small niche game that I did a terrible job of marketing, and my one review so far was quite positive so I’ll count that as a small win as I move onwards to the next game.
EDIT: Here’s the game because my reply is getting harder to spot below - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2792160/SnowDown/ - It’s a small Jackbox-inspired party game (using phones as controllers) but with real-time action and physics as you throw snowballs around and destroy structures.
you cant just SAY that and then not mention the game name
wow you really are bad at marketing
The eternal conflict between being an indie dev and not wanting to be a shill :'(
What is the game? It’s not being a shill to answer questions.
By the way, here’s the game for anyone interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2792160/SnowDown/
I didn’t expect to see so many replies!
As someone who is also awkwardly treading the line between being a soulless hack and trying to get my work noticed by literally anyone: please edit your top comment with a link to your game.
I mean it. I can’t even muster the courage to post my renders to Instagram without feeling like some desperate influencer goof.
Bro this is literally all in your head. 99.9 don’t give a fuck what you do or don’t do, either positively or negatively.
I’d you want to show it, show it. If you want to keep it for you, keep it. But it’s not about other people. It’s about you making YOUR choice.
I have lots of bills that are less than that every month, and yet somehow I can’t just say they’re not worth paying…
I am guessing you dont have service providers from all over the globe with international transaction fees
If I did I’d probably have lots of little satellite offices in various regions to make that easier.
I’ve had Google charge me $0.01 before for firebase usage.
They really should have waited until I owed more since that cost them money.
On my personal AWS account, Im paying them 0.17 cents a month.
I wonder if they pay a fee since it’s hooked into my credit card.
0.17 cents
So is that less than a cent or is it 17 cents? If it’s the former, I don’t think it’s even possible to make a transaction that small.
They’re bigger so it’s hard to know, but it’s usually something like 2.9% + 10c a transaction.
At their scale though who knows
Only in us tho. I think eu has it set to percantage only.
I’m sure if you owed them 100 bucks they’d demand it
*$99
I guess I shouldn’t be expected to pay for games until my total is over a hundred bucks then?
No you pay a financial service provider who pays Steam in bulk once a month. So yes same principle applies.
shouldn’t those service providers wait until the total is $100 before they started to receive my money due to cost associated to sending and receiving money then?
The service providers are the ones who dictate the costs. They provide the infrastructure. The costs for these kind of transactions are much much lower because of economy of scale they handle millions of transactions per day across all their clients. Because they handle so many transactions they can charge a small percentage fee. The loss they make on small transactions they will make up with bigger transactions.
While Steam uses a normal bank transactions to pay developers, because many of them are in the hundreds of thousands and some are in the millions of dollars so you don’t want to have a third party handling those that asks a percentage fee. You’d rather just pay the fixed fee the bank charges per transaction. Since it is cheaper for those large transactions. That fee can be $10-$20 especially on international transactions. That’s why Steam waits till that money is above a $100. And using a third party to handle those small transactions wouldn’t be worth the hassle. The percentage fee would be high anyway because of the low volume.
My experience every month.
I feel you, on Twitch is 50$.
How do people make money there?
I can’t even begin to understand how hard it is to make it on Twitch. I assume probably the top 1000 streamers make the real money and the rest 99,5% probably make like $50 per month…
I streamed for like a year and a half+ and I only managed to reach the 50$ treshold to cash out 2 times, so yeah, it’s very rough.
Do they just, make the money disappear if you don’t reach the 50 or do they add up till you reach 50?
They save it.
subscribers and something called bits of which i dont know the purpose.
Bits are basically donations.
