How much MONEY I've made selling my indie GAMES on STEAM? | 2023
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- Опубликовано: 6 июн 2024
- My first games that I sold on steam in my game developer career have been selling for a while and now I've made a few more so I wanted to take a look at how much money they have made. I also wanted to go over how I can improve being a game dev based on what I've seen work and what has failed so far. So how much money I've made selling my indie games on steam? Well that is the question, so I wanted to go over making money sellings games, selling your game on steam, and how to make money as a game developer. I hope you learn something so your launch goes well!
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Not to make the numbers worse.... but your time developing the games doesn't have a $0 value.
I’ve always viewed it like this. If you weren’t developing games, what would you be doing with your spare time?
If the answer is something that wouldn’t produce income (watching Netflix or playing games). Then I would say yes, the time did have a $0 value.
If the answer is “well, I would have stuck with my 9-5 job earning money” then yes, your time does have a value.
@@ninepoundgames4377 Counter point: 3 months later, sorry.
Netflix costs money, so by default it has a $/time value. Playing games also costs money. Both require a visual electronic of some sort, usually a TV or Monitor. Both require hardware to run on. Netflix is often on many consoles and tv sets now, so let's assume it's on the console that the games also get played on. Well that cost money too. And so did that TV or monitor. And the games, not to mention the netflix subscription already touched upon earlier.
And then there is the internet connection. I'm gonna assume that costs money too, assuming you pay for that. And everything else up to this point.
But wait, there's more.
Electricity.
Sure, it might only be a few hundred watts from the wall with everything involved, maybe less, perhaps more. Depends on the setup. But that is a new cost added on over time now, much like that subscription. Where as games and purchased movies/tv-shows non subscription model are one of costs, these two continue.
So, all in all, that time spent entertaining yourself is not worthless by default. There is a sunken cost put into that stuff. But with that said, let's look at another aspect to this. Let's say you go out to the movies instead, or go to some bowling alley to hang out with friends. Well, those cost money too. All in all, unless you are literally doing nothing other than laying on the ground, outside of a house, and not much else with much else; your time has some intrinsic value attached to it.
It might not be much. But it's there.
Personally, I see my 'lazy/me time' as my "avoiding future hospital and psychiatrist vists" cost. So it's worth quite a good bit to me. I've already burnt both ends of the candle long enough in my younger years, and tried to work not one or two jobs, but 4. Just to catch up and get ahead finally eventually. Then 2020 hit. Let's just say that even though I dodged the 2020 medically, I still ended up finding myself recovering from all that from prior; even up til right now to some extent. Still not quite back on the 100% level yet. Might never be...
Anyways. I just wanted to hopefully bring a ... different... perspective to this that maybe you will find useful someday. You may not realize it right now, but the time you spend for yourself doing "nothing", could well be the reason why you are able to get through some tough times to come. There is solace in the solitude sometimes.
Thank you for making your numbers public even though I'm sure its a bit scary! Even if the sales may not be amazing, the experience you gained through all of your hard work is the most important thing! Releasing MULTIPLE games is really impressive, considering the amount of devs that either give up or can't commit enough to release one(aka me lol). Keep up the good work!
Thanks 👈🏻👈🏻🤖
Always good to see the raw numbers and I'm sure theres a lot of other game developers out there that could benefit from seeing that making the game is just _one part_ of the puzzle
Tru dat 🤖
100% appreciate the look behind the curtains at the Sales and Costs. Thank you!
Really cool to see all the stats so transparently! Considering how expensive some hobbies can be, I’d be happy to see numbers like that
Great job through the years. Keep it up!!!
That was a really cool breakdown of all your games. It was nice to see all of the stats and updates on games from previous years. I don't think I've seen an indie dev do such a thurough breakdown before, and that was nice to see. I think it was a much more realisitic peak behind the curtains for a lot of indie devs compared to the bigger indie dev youtubers who often make a lot from their games. I really like the art and style for Okashi Towers, keep up the good work.
Yo, the fact that you completed and released so many games is a mad inspiring! Love seeing the progress from game to game, as well, and i appreciate a look into the behind the scenes revenue figures. Looking forward to what you have next!
Hats off to you for keeping at it.
Thanks for taking one for the team.
The last game truly shines over the previous ones, showing your experience gains. My bet was $6-26K on this one. If I had to guess the issue is with the genre. TD was profitable in times of Flash. If it was more of a Stardew Valley type of the game this cozy art would perfectly fit.
Keep going!
So, I went and checked out the Steam page and I don't think it's necessarily the genre (or at least that's not it alone). The trailer is the issue. It tells me absolutely *nothing* about the game. I had to go check the description in order to figure out what I was looking at. The trailer needs to grab my attention and make it clear *immediately* what sort of game it is. Halloween-candy-themed tower defense? I'm in! And I think lots of other people would be too! But if it takes a prospective buyer actual effort to understand your game, they're going to move on. And that's a shame. The good news is that the game can still make lots of money, it just needs a new trailer and a little push, imo
Good call. I suggest scratching the current trailer and replacing it with some action. You have only 3 to 10 seconds to catch the user's attention and need to pack the most into these seconds.
I bet your last game made way more by now. it looks very well made! thank you for the numbers, I'm just at the begining and it's scares me how difficult it is
Love the breakdowns, maybe next time you can also show how much you make from the RUclips vids? Would be very insightful!
I love videos like these. Thanks for sharing, I look forward to posting my first net loss video in 2024.
Keep making games! Just from watching your video here, it looks like they just keep getting better. Good luck :)
Hah yeah I mean I would like to make a successful game at some point but it’s still fun to look back at the games where I successfully pull in strong negative profits
Good luck! 👈🏻👈🏻🤖
Nice dude! Making small games so you can learn and grow quickly is the way to go :) :)
Hey man, good luck. You'll keep improving, and eventually, you can live off making games (if that is your goal IDK). Your last game is a clear improvement.
actually good breakdown for once. nice
this was pretty interesting! one thing that i would reccomend though to make your games look much better is to use a special font. for example, your latest game that you're still working on would look much better with a pixel font!
Thanks 👈👈🤖
I'll play around with it and see if I can find a good one, thanks for the tip 🤖
please keep doing this every year.
Really good stuff, in my opinion is so far you made games you want and what you love, thats great but if you want higher sales you need to start putting effort in loving what the "market" wants. Its a different type of enjoyment,even on ideas you might dislike on a personal level, they can be fun
Thanks for sharing! When you work on a game that you are planning to put on Steam, do you make whatever you want to make? Or do you try to prioritize ideas with good marketability / have wide audience appeal?
Usually it’s just what I want to make hah but I would like to make a game that fits a more modern/wider audience at some point
Losses? No thanks. Negative profits? Much better.
keep going dude, you got me to make games. do you use a pen tablet and krita or just a mouse and aseprite to create the game character design.
Ayyy thats awesome dewd!
Hmm I usually use a pen/tablet with Clip Studio Paint for digital art. For pixel art I usually use a mouse + aseprite because the tablet slows me down and feels clunky (I didn't use aseprite for the older games so thats why they look pretty rough). For general image editing though I use GIMP just because I've used it forever 🤖
Good luck with your games!
Just keep doing u bro but yea with all that talent u have u got to step it up and make a really good game
Keep up the fight, and enjoy your time.
Even if you dont make money, if you make things you love, the journey is worth it. Keep going. So long as you've got a roof over your head and a computer on your desk, why not keeping doing what you love.
Thanks for the candid video, its helpful to so many. Wish you the best.❤
Making games is hard, selling games is harder, but you proved that both are possible👍
Your catalogue of games is growing. More games, more sales is how I see it.
I might buy ur games to support u
Well, obviously this isn't the greatest, but I mean, you've put 3 years into doing this and made a bit of money so it's not nothing. And I'm sure there was a ton of experience learned along the way. And it's 3 years and you're already on your 4th game! So that's actually pretty amazing (I haven't made a single commercial game lol). Hopefully Okashi Towers will be the one to net you a bit more. But I admire your perseverance and your transparency. Thank you for showing these numbers. And good luck!
This year I have been making 2 or 3 games per month. I'm planning to publish 20 games at least on Steam this year.
Dang dude I wish I could make 2 games a month! I’m learning and have been working on my first one for a month now, and it’s extremely bare and boring haha!
This is exactly why I stopped developing games and chose something else to do with my spare time. I developed games for about 10 years in my spare time. I made about $5000 of profit in those years. Sounds like a nice extra, but that doesn't include buying equipment needed to develop the games, hardware and software. In the end it's a lot of time spent for little profit. It's a lot of fun though and it taught me many good skills. I moved from game development to art, using a number of the skills acquired over the years and building on them. I'm now making more profit in one year than I did in those 10 years and that's with all the real costs deducted. For me game development was a stepping stone to something much better. Who knows what it eventually will bring for you.
what kind of marketing do you do? also any specific ones that is better than the other?
Well for the current game I tried
-Posting To Reddit (Gets good traffic but most of the time gets removed for self promo or some other hidden rule in the sub, or the mods just don't like it lol)
-Posting on Twitter/X (I gave up on this and ended up just deleting some of those posts, it really didn't do much for me)
-Getting streamers to play (Its cool to see them play but it doesn't do much to drive people to the store page)
-Steam Next Fest (This contributed to about 80% of all the wishlists)
-Devlogs (This is more of a long game, but it contributes a little bit slowly over time)
I will probably experiment again with google ads for the full release. Hope that helps! 🤖
Have you done a sale yet? 20% sale and you will show up on all of the wishlisters notifications, do it after a big update and you'll get a good boost in sales
Just the launch sale so far, have to wait a month before steam lets you do the first sale so we’ll see how that goes 👈🏻👈🏻🤖
There's a hidden gain here in experience of game making. The first game took you a year and the 2nd took you 1.5 months. That was insane. The 3rd had you learning multiplayer games and now you're making a wayy better looking game. I'd suggest following creators like "the game maker's toolkit" for tips on making the player addicted, but you might prolly already know him and many many others more like him.
Thanks! It definitely has helped to grow my own libraries over time so it takes less time to make a new game even if its more complicated. I've seen some of their videos before but I'll have to watch some more since I definitely need to get better at making games that hold player interest 🤖
@@Blekoh Also, have you thought about using AI to help with the game creation process? Not just graphic design but also maybe coding parts as well? How has that gone and what issues have you found with that?
@@woodsofchaos I use AI every now and then for small things like if I know an algorithm I want done for a very specific function I’ll just have it generate it. The main problem coding wise is that I use Godot and it generally struggles with gdscript and tries to use python functions a lot that don’t exist so I usually have to fix it afterwards but it is nice for those small use cases.
For large stuff it’s just faster for me to write it and it’s done the way I want it. Especially since I’ve been programming for around 19 years so it’s just second nature to me.
Art wise it can be nice to get some references for things that would be hard to find otherwise. Usually it struggles pixel art wise though so as far as actually using what it makes it’s not really there yet.
I generally try to use it as little as possible anyway though just because if I do it myself I get better over time whereas if I just let an AI do it then I’m not really improving
@@Blekoh hmm thanks. Subscribing to your channel!
HAHAAHa at least you honest, I am embarrassed to show my losses LOL but in between those I have a few hits most of them misses about 90% negative $
Can’t win ‘em all haha but it would be nice to at least win 1 lol
Hello Blekoh! i wanna ask u question, where are u from?
because i think it's depends on the place u live.
On the East Coast, USA 👈👈🤖
As solo devs, I think it's important to be harsh with ourselves and ask why should I buy this game? What does my game bring to the table that other similar games don't? If there are hundreds of similar games made by bigger teams with bigger budgets, then the game is likely to be of lower quality, and the customer would rather buy the higher quality product.
I think you should make a better looking polished game if you want it to succeed.
God damn it - you deserve better. My recommendation is to make something "stupid" and funny again. I think people prefer ugly and funny games that are made on purpose instead of games that try to look good but only copy mechanics (like that cat tower defense). Make a spinoff of Beardy McStrongarm in Multiplayer where his friend Baldy McLongfoot joins the adventure and they together can transform into a Megabeard McKickass super character where each player controls one part of the body xD
I watch this video and was in pain... I know this guy content from his first video... 😢 Wow
Bro I want to cry for you
Would you consider making the games free, and selling an ad-free version as an upgrade?
If I'm honest I can't stand ads and I like to make games I would play myself so if I was going to make a free game it would just be totally free with no ads (which is fine with me but when I make multiplayer games or just steam games in general I use steam's libraries and steam takes a $100 fee so I just feel like I would at least like to make the fee back)
which I realize not trying to monetize with ads is a pretty bad financial take but it would just be one of those things that would be hard to bring myself to do since I feel like more of a sellout that way hah. But at the end of the day I probably just need to make better games
@Blekoh i'm making a free educational game now but since it'll be used by children, i can't use ads. but i can limit the number of daily lives, similar to how duolingo does it. that's my plan... and also i may add "fake ads" which would just be public service announcements that i make about the importance of reading.
@@zejugames5045 Nice, good luck with your game 👈🏻👈🏻🤖
u need to focus on the graphics
u need a unique artstyle so the veiwer can buy the game
I agree. The games need more polishing
Considering this games are not targeting really a casual gamers but more some alternative games players, not bad. If you made something like Jazz Jackrabit 2, I am sure you would earn at least 3K from casual gamers.
Have you partnered with any publishers? Do you do free marketing using social media?
I've tried marketing on different platforms like twitter/reddit/youtube but I generally don't pull much traffic, reddit is probably the best but its really easy to get banned
Oh and no I haven't tried to partner with a publisher, I know a few people who have and from what happened to them I'm really not sure I would want to go that route but maybe one day hah 🤖
@@Blekoh thanks for sharing your experience! Great video, btw.
@@Blekoh you need a designer
think about it ... if you are a guy who want to play games would you put your money on that game ?
can you solo kiro 2?
Well I've solo'd it, but its definitely not easy hah
do you make games full time or you have day job?
I've worked as a software engineer for about 12 years, but this past year I decided to take a year off.
So previous games I would spend about 3-4 hours a day after work to make them, Okashi Towers I spent about 8-10 hours a day 7 days a week hah. But yeah will have to get another jorb soon 🤖
@@Blekoh i can tell that you really have passion on game development, i envy you because you still have the energy to work on your games after your day job, like i really wanted to know how you do that? is it because you have a relaxing day job that some weeks you have barely work to do or you have techniques that enables you to work on your projects even after a busy stressful day job?
@@engame1702 Hmm well most of my jobs were high stress and I was always really busy pretty much every day but they weren’t physically demanding since it’s just a software job, just mentally demanding. It wasn’t really easy to do both but game development is my relaxing time and usually I would separate work and game dev by going on a run or doing something active first and then come back and work on my own stuff for a few hours.
I am gonna be brutaly honest. It is awesome you are taking a leap of faith and actually finishing games, and they are pretty cool! But for the level of quality the price points are WAY too high. You are selling a game for half of hollow knight which is a crazy, gigantic, amazingly polished game in every aspect. Maybe try to focus on polishing more so it looks more like a high end product, or try getting numbers by making the games way cheaper, like mobile game companies do!
I do NOT mean to be rude, I am legit trying to help with my opinion!
Good luck on ur journey!
you took away my motivation to finish my game hahahahaha
It all depends on what kind of game u make💀
Have you considered making mobile games?
Well I just don’t really play mobile games so I haven’t really considered it but maybe one day I might try it out 👈🏻👈🏻🤖
And the leason we learned was: do not spend money with marketing... :')
I think there’s definitely a way to make it work especially now with all the tools google ads have, so I might try again at some point but we’ll see hah
@@Blekoh haha yeah man, I was just kidding
jesus. if it were me, i'd worry how the hell i'm still alive.
Are you solo?
Yep for better or for worse hah 🤖
@Blekoh don't know
I myself prefer solo too
1:20 ma boi's about to cry... LMFAO, It's atleast a cool game dude. don't worry
Brutal. I can't complain about the "gross income" which was like 100fold the revenue of these games. But I can, and will complain about the 30% tax, and 30% STEAM take on top of the 5-8% refunds. That is the one and only thing I still hate about STEAM. They take far too much from indie developers.
Hi. Sorry for your disappointing sales numbers but there is a clear reasons. As you may heard many times, the graphics really matter. Then the gameplay should be inovative but nothing completely different from current games. Also, all of the games seems very slow paced which get be boring very soon. You also need top notch trailers for the games. Another mistake was that you spend marketing only on your first game. You need to promote your game these days. Hope this helped you a bit. Good luck !
i think is more because you make games about stuff people dont care much
I am sorry to say this but you price your games too high. It's not that they are not cool but in the flood of indie titles on Steam it only takes a few seconds to find what other of games also cost the same. And unfortunatelly if players can choose between your games and other games in that same price range they seem to pick other games.
This is depressing 😓
But your games are crappy. It would be bad for the market if that kind of games would be profitable. Spending 2+ years making decent game is way better approach.
The first one isn't that creepy