Inspired by true events from this morning

  • Road_Warrior_10@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • SirDerpy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Does Steam take a cut for distribution?

      If not, while this emotionally sucks, they’ve a solid operational policy.

      • Road_Warrior_10@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        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%.

        • SirDerpy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            11·
            3 months ago

            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.

  • maneframe@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    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.