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.
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.
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 : )
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
Whats the game? :)
I’m sure if you owed them 100 bucks they’d demand it
Fairly certain I’ve bought a game that was like 34 cents or something. I definitely charged me the 34 cents.
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!
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!
You know what? Fuck you.
Buys “Be A Rock”
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?
I love that the Lemmy workshopped toaster has made it to the Steam page already.
Wish listed!
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. :)
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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.
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 $1 of use out of it.
itch.io once sent me 4$
They don’t seem to have an issue sending $10 refunds to my bank account, I wonder how much it actually costs them
The bigger cost is probably the processing time, limiting to $100 probably drops the number of payments by 80%.
Especially when they’re making bank charging 30%.
I used to make mobile apps as a hobby and I still get the weekly report of my dwindling numbers.
Happens to me almost every month. Good thing I didn’t quit my day job.
My experience every month.
Jesus. This makes it reasonable to just buy $100 worth of your own game every month, just to make sure. Assuming that the number of real sales cover Valve’s percentage and then some. Yeah, that’s a non-zero opportunity cost for you, and additional float for Valve, however petty it may be. But for a small developer, maybe that makes sense.
The break even point would be at a balance of 23.08$. However, if the account balance doesn’t expire, buying your own game to put you over the threshold would be checking the couch cushions for loose change level of desperation.
Oh, it’s petty cash to be sure. If you have $100-ish bucks to throw around, you probably aren’t going to miss much by not doing this. Unless, of course, letting someone else take even one dollar from you in this way is against your religion or something (i.e. the principle of the thing). Conversely, if you need the handful of dollars this makes, you probably don’t have that kind of walking-around money in the first place.
Policy schmolicy. Withholding even one cent you are owed is fucking shitty.
don’t make shitty asset flips then
