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
It does make sense from a payment processing standpoint. It doesn’t make sense to spend more money on creating the transaction than is actually being sent.
I used to pay a particular company by purchase order for this exact reason. CC takes 2-3% of the payment, but purchase order - they’ve got to get themselves into the company system, track the PO, invoice, track the payment…at the time, a common estimate was $50 to process a PO, and if you’re only buying $100 batches, that’s a big hit. Did not like that company, but they were the only place to get whatever it was I had to buy.
Sending a simple transaction like this costs a couple cents though, which they could in theory bill to the developer as well. Setting the threshold at 100 is probably more to accrue additional interest on Steams bank accounts.
I think in the US I’ve heard ETF/ACH transaction fees are usually around $2.50? It might be possible to have that apply across a batch, though, as in if you submit 10 payments to 10 different people as a single transaction it’s still just $2.50, or 25¢ per person. I’m only getting this from hearing accountants complain at companies I’ve worked with, so I don’t understand the details. But I’ve seen it pretty common with companies doing payouts to want to see a minimum amount before they actually send the payment, otherwise it’s not worth doing.
Absolutely. It’s got to be the way it is. Just kinda feels bad at first
It accumulates
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.
Competition in capitalism is always better than a lack thereof. But, we’ve not busted monopolies in a significant way since Ma Bell. And, even if we were, at 75% of the global market share they’d not warrant any action yet.
There’s going to be a dominant organization because late stage capitalism sucks. And, I’d rather it be Valve than some alternative trying to fuck me over at every opportunity.
The thing is, steam’s market dominance is one of user choice rather than anticompetitive strategies or lack of alternatives. Steam doesn’t do exclusives, they don’t charge you for external sales, they don’t even prevent you from selling steam keys outside the platform, or users from launching non steam games in the client. The only real restriction is that access to steam services requires a license in the active steam account. Even valve-produced devices like the steam deck can install from other stores.
Sure, dominance is bad in an abstract theoretical way and it’d be nice if Gog, itch.io, etc were more competitive, but Steam is dominant because consumers actively choose it.
Yeah! Other publishers should open their own stores and compete!
…
Oh wait no fuck oh god oh what have we done
Epic can only compete because they’ve few users and are willing to operate at a near loss
Bullshit. Epic’s loses are in paying for exclusives and giving away games while ruining their PR.
Steam could operate at 15% if they wanted to. But… why would they do that?
Neither is publicly traded. Neither of us know the numbers.
Does Steam make money on hosting indie games?
How does one research such a question?
I don’t need answers. I had them before I made my second post above.
Good luck to you.
https://sell.amazon.com/pricing#referral-fees
I guess, according to you, it costs more to host files than it does to ship you a physical USB.
Maybe all these apps stores need to look into physical delivery in order to bring their costs down.
Isn’t it free up to a certain amount?
Also aren’t you able to create steam keys for free and resell them wherever you want and they won’t take a cut off those?
Steam only charges that for larger developers though iirc
I see you settled on a design for the toaster. Love the mustache.
Thank you : )
Other games include “be a rock” and “pizza synthwave” and this is the weird one.
Wish listed.
You raised my hopes, and dashed them quite expertly sir! Bravo!
Ayy I remember that toaster! This looks great! The sign with “Do not bite yourself to check whether you are a cake” got me smiling good
Oooh, I remember seeing you post about the toaster
Since i’m a sucker for weird games and very bad at following simple rules i wishlisted your new game lol
Whats the game? :)
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?
I don’t use a controller, but I bought two copies for friends that do! Keep going, make more games, add features! (Like maybe keyboard controls for us dinosaurs.)
I believe in you!
Oh my gosh, thank you so much!
Keyboard support is definitely a must for our other games. I’m becoming more aware of the importance of accessibility.
Steam Deck support?
I’m afraid not, this came out well before the deck and I can’t afford one to test on.
I’m not sure that it’s a good target for the deck anyway where it’s a splitscreen game.
It most likely works, steamdeck can be plugged into a monitor. I’ll check it out later (:
Looks like fun, I’ll play it with my kids!
Whats the game
Whats the game? :)
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.
I’m sure if you owed them 100 bucks they’d demand it
*$99
Perhaps that’s a $99 discount on the next amount owed?
Fairly certain I’ve bought a game that was like 34 cents or something. I definitely charged me the 34 cents.
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.
I get not saying the name in the top comment, but once people are interested the door is open.
Trying to sell 'owt without becoming a sell-out.
Oof, though you’re not wrong!
This IS the game.
I lost the game.
Fuck. I lost it too.
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!
This is super cute! If I buy these now for my friends and family but set it to deliver the gift near Christmas, would you get the money now? Or not til Christmas?
This looks perfect for when everyone is over on Christmas eve! <3
I’m glad you like it! I actually made my first prototype right before last Christmas so I could play it when my family got together, and people enjoyed it so much I just kept working on it.
As far as gifting goes, I actually didn’t know you could get Steam gifts that deliver later, so I’m not entirely sure of the answer, but I assume if they charge you for the game right away it would process the payment then too.
Full disclosure though, only one person needs a copy of the game to run it and play with a group. Everyone joins the game by visiting a website (generally on their phone), similar to how Jackbox games work. So there’s no obligation to gift copies, but if you still do I will be quite honored and grateful!
Aww, you’re adorable. I will buy the games closer to Christmas for everyone, my reading tells me that if I buy the game and the person does not accept the gift then they will give me a refund, so I imagine you won’t get the money until everyone accepts.
Got it on follow, if I ever get a house with a better Internet connection I’ll give it a shot and leave a review
Reminds me of some of the old school flash multiplayer games
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.
That’s a good call, thanks!
I can relate though, I’ve honestly avoided actively using social media for the better part of a decade, so dipping my toe back in the waters has been a bit of a struggle. I can’t help overanalyzing everything I write, to the point it becomes exhausting trying to regularly post anything. And then it often feels like an exercise in futility anyway when you’re lost in the sea of other posts.
So I figure for now I’ll focus my energy on making games and especially improving with the visuals (admittedly I’m a programmer first and foremost, so art is not my strong suit), and hopefully gradually gain more confidence.
By the way, I’ve really appreciated yours and everyone’s encouraging comments here! Funnily enough, this is the most attention a post of mine has ever received, and I wasn’t even intending for it
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.
this is unexpected, i was expecting a COD type game but instead it has penguins and you’re supposed to have friends
Considering you’re a hobbyist and probably don’t have marketing, it’s too soon to say it’s a flop. Many games like that pop off later once it gets seen.
I appreciate the optimism! I hope it can find an audience over time, but it’s definitely tough to stand out. For now, I’m aiming to just keep making games and improving, rather than giving up after the first try, which sadly seems to happen a lot out there.
Rarely happens. The vast majority of game on Steam make the bulk of their sales within a few months of release.
What’s your game? Niche games are awesome. And if you made it with Godot I’m definitely interested.
Here’s my game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2792160/SnowDown/
It’s a little action party game you can play with phones as controllers (similar to how you’d host a Jackbox game). And yes I did make it with Godot!
This looks perfect for office downtime with the team on slow days
Add twitch integration. Viral success overnight
Unfortunately I’ve found that the latency over streaming makes the game less fun to play than when joining locally (or over a faster video call service like Discord), but for my next game I’m designing it to be more streaming-friendly so I’ll definitely be looking at building an integration then.
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.
Cheaper this way. Clearly you don’t business. /s
My bank: “We have a new valuation on your home! Open your app to see it!”
…
“It’s down 2%!”
hah same energy
If you want to support me, a wishlist of my current game will mean the world to me: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2336120/Do_Not_Press_The_Button_To_Delete_The_Multiverse/
But please don’t spend money on my previous games, I recognize that they aren’t that good I don’t want to burden anyone financially with them (I loved every minute of making them, but I was still a noob back then).
FYI you have a typo in your last screenshot (This sign m[a]y not…):
Arhgh missed that! Thank you so much!
Now you should name something MYNOT
But please don’t spend money on my previous games, I recognize that they aren’t that good I don’t want to burden anyone financially with them (I loved every minute of making them, but I was still a noob back then).
You’re not my mum! I bought Be a Rock anyway. Keep going, make games!
I believe in you!
I will advertise this to my friends, they have lots of young people in their circles that go through games at a good pace. This looks right up their alley.
WOW! Thank you so much! Word of mouth is important for small indie dev teams
My partner and I are both buying “Do Not Press The Button” as soon as it’s out. I’ve also told my friends about it lawl
Seems like our bag for sure.
You know what? Fuck you.
Buys “Be A Rock”
The screenshots sell it well. That’s some funny stuff. I’ll check out the demo.
Thank you :)
Would you mind explaining how wishlisting a game helps the devs? Is it an algorithm thing? Will it be shown to more people when it is being wishlisted more?
yeah pretty much, if a ton of people wishlist a game it pops up more on the front pages of categories bc that means it’s rlly popular
Does Wishlisting a game help the developer in anyway other than indicating excitement for a game?
I’d love to know if there an any incentive to interacting with a game’s store page other than buying a game, obviously.
If Steam gives a bonus for that kind of thing, I’m going to be a lot more generous with my clicks.
It definitely helps. Every dev I’ve heard talking about releasing a game stresses wishlisting. I forget why, unfortunately. It might make it more noticable, sort of like likensub on YouTube.
I do know that refunding a game is the absolute worst thing you can do to it.
I think its because people who wishlisted will get a notification to buy it once its out, boosting the game’s sales at launch, giving it a better chance to be featured on the front pages
You’re correct on the two thoughts you listed. Wishlisting also makes the game more visible before release. For example, highly wishlisted games appear in the “Popular Upcoming” section, along with some other spots. This increased visibility before launch then feeds into the two points you made. I believe games that are highly wishlisted before launch are also more likely to appear on the frontpage right after launch.
This is what I assumed,but if it helps in any other way, I’m happy to wishlist more games from small time developers.
I use likes and subs liberally on apps like YouTube or TikTok, even if I wouldn’t normally want to subscribe. It costs me nothing to do and gives someone else joy. Why wouldn’t I?
Eh, it messes up my algorithm but I don’t care. These Corporations know too much about me anyway, might as well give them a curveball.
Good catch, I didn’t think about that.
One of my friends has your game wishlisted. That’s one more than I expected to see based on your post, so shoutouts to you for exceeding expectations! Hope you keep making better and better games. :)
I love that the Lemmy workshopped toaster has made it to the Steam page already.
Wish listed!
Wish listed! Also bought Be a Rock, I look forward to being a rock later tonight, it sounds fantastic!
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Funnily I saw the playthrough of your game in YouTube and it really looks like a labour of love. As the guy who did the playthrough suggested, still need to buy it as a thank you.
Or is that another game with a red button? The maker of the game I’m thinking about wrote a comment on YouTube
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.
Bruh, don’t give them ideas for the next price hike!
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.
This might’ve changed but 10 years ago the small shop next to my school said they wouldn’t allow card payments of under 1 EUR because they’d be losing money. In Estonia
Nope. Just depends on the processor
Once a month I’d have to pay a few pennies to Google for our cloud use at a school district I worked for. It always baffled me!
They should almost just make it so the blaze plan of firebase or other cloud services has a $1 non refundable pre-payment so they can just whittle away at the pennies instead of getting charged processing/transaction fees on a $0.01 transaction. Tops up to $1 if it goes to $0
I think people would pay $1 to enable the paid plans. If you’re going that far, you’re getting $1 of use out of it.
itch.io once sent me 4$
I feel you, on Twitch is 50$.
How do people make money there?
They don’t. Their payouts leaked a couple years ago, of the thousands of streamers there’s a few hundred that make minimum wage or better. This pattern holds true for YouTube, only fans, etc.
It’s way more than a few hundred. What leaked was the twitch subscriber payout, which doesn’t count all the money spent on bits. Then there’s also sponsorships and youtube content.
I follow several Path of Exile streamers, and when that released they said that that was not the total payout. They usually do some video guides of builds for the game that, alongside twitch generates content for them. Then there’s also sponsors for gaming rigs and other kind of stuff, sponsors to try new games… Maybe it’s PoE specifically but even streamers that oscillate between 200-800, maybe 1k viewers when there’s no other PoE streamer online earned more that minimum wage with just the twitch payout (given the country they live in ofc).
How often are those small streamers the only one though? Having times where you do almost ok aren’t that great if you make nothing 30% of your streaming time.
Given that the leak was the annual earnings from subs your question is irrelevant since it shows that the total average amounts enough.
For every streamer that makes minimum wage there are dozens that make so little they don’t even get paid.
It’s still more than a few hundred. I don’t remember how big the leaked doc was but it wasn’t in the thousands, it was bigger. Your statement can be true while the statement of the one I responded to be incorrect at the same time.
I mean, you comment is true and refutes nothing I said.
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.
I streamed for 2 years and I got 5 viewers at once that one time my friend raided me. I’m not fit for human consumption.
My average was between 2 and 3 viewers.
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.
For most people, it’s a hobby for fun, not a job.
Those that want to make a job out of it tend to spread out the content creation to youtube and tiktok, and often sponsorships fill in the gaps.
The ones that actually make a decent living only from streaming are a fraction of one percent.
subscribers and something called bits of which i dont know the purpose.
Bits are basically donations.
They don’t seem to have an issue sending $10 refunds to my bank account, I wonder how much it actually costs them
Complete guess here, but refunds are probably handled differently by the banks compared to new payments, i.e. undoing an error is probably free(ish), but paying people is how they get you
Especially when they’re making bank charging 30%.
The bigger cost is probably the processing time, limiting to $100 probably drops the number of payments by 80%.
Do they just keep your earning in your account until one month your total outstanding earnings breach the 100$ threshold and you’ll receive all your earning in one transaction or does this money get swallowed by steam?
I think they keep your money until reach the threshold. Steam aren’t scummy so I’m pretty sure there is no shady stuff going on with your money.
Yeah i was about to ask that. If they just took all amounts below 100 for themselves that would be super fucked up and probably illegal.
I used to make mobile apps as a hobby and I still get the weekly report of my dwindling numbers.
How do you get into this? Could you DM me the info and perhaps a good starting place? I can’t work right now due to an injury and I’d love to look into this
My experience is with iPhone (yeah yeah boo Apple).
Most of how I learned was just digging through Apple’s documentation, focusing on one goal at a time. How do I draw stuff to the screen? How do I handle touch inputs? How do I use the built in UI elements? How do I play sounds? How do I get GPS data? Things like that. I’d usually have an idea of a specific mini-project that would make use of a specific new tool.
Note that I already had some programming experience (although it wasn’t much) before I started teaching myself this way.
Here’s Apple’s website: https://developer.apple.com/develop/
Just start by downloading XCode and playing with one of their sample projects. SpriteKit is particularly easy to get started with and there’s a sample project for it. (I’m assuming you want to make something like a game. If you want to make more of a utility app, look up SwiftUI).
If you aren’t an
iPhone user“Apple fanboy”, you can try this: https://developer.android.com/coursesAlso many game engines (e.g. Godot, Unreal,
Unity) have support for both iOS and Android.Thank you man/ma’am! Bunches!
I’ve been waiting like 20 years for my money from NewGrounds. I was at $80 last time I checked a while ago.
