God, that's awful. That 30% cut for the middle man hurts. At least the government tax can be put to good use (emphasis on can...)
God, that's awful. That 30% cut for the middle man hurts. At least the government tax can be put to good use (emphasis on can...)
Stardew likely qualifies for the reduced store cuts. Steam _lowers_ the percentage for a game when it sells high. Still somewhere between 10 and 25%, though.
Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
This, however, is one area where eventually Epic Games shines — they take a much lower cut and if they increase in popularity with gamers then steam might be forced to lower their share.
> Still somewhere between 10 and 25%, though.
This is basically almost public information: 25% cut on earnings between $10 million and $50 million.
Yet most likely very big share of sales is well below $10 let alone $15 due to sales and regional pricing.
So yeah I doubt numbers anywhere close to those adverised.
> Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
Steam no longer provide any discoverability on its own unless you either bring your own community ftom outside or spend $10,000-100,000 on marketing to gain wishlists.
If you're small 2-10 people indie gamedev studio and have external funding Valve will earn more from your game than you.
In this case, as a solo dev, it's probably quite justified to be honest. I doubt ConcernedApe would have really been able to continue solo-ing it with this level of success if he also had to maintain distribution channels, sales/returns, marketing, legal stuff on a global scale.
It's probably the big name studios who already have entire departments to do that kind of stuff that feel they're being ripped off.
Actually the more you earn the worse the deal is - he's probably paid about $100 million for what amounts to $100,000s of labor if he paid people to take care of this stuff, and some (low) millions in taxes collected for various jurisdictions. Dude's personally bought Gabe a ship in exchange for some accounting.
Gabe gotta buy a $500 million dollar yacht.
It pays to be the middle man!
The yacht and the company that makes it. Plus like 10 other ships. His fleet probably employs more people than Steam lmao.
And the DJ, I suppose. Somebody's gonna have to keep that rave going.
I mean the company taking the 30% cut also pays taxes on that so more then you'd guess are going to taxes.