Average Indie Game Sales On Steam

How much coin do Steam games make?

06 Aug, 2020

How-do-you-do, I'1000 Karl Kontus, one of the creators of a free games marketplace research platform Video Game Insights. In this article, I will look into how much money do Steam games make? How much acquirement Steam games have generated over their lifetime – is it actually every bit low as we've anecdotally heard? I'm going to cover all Steam games, then dig into indie games in item and look at how information technology changes by genre.

Revenue distribution for Steam games

The Indie game industry is well known for being a challenging and oft non financially rewarding. It's incredibly competitive and has historically lacked mainstream need from casual gamers. More than that, most indie dev teams aren't well rounded and set out to succeed.

The developers are very oft not devoting enough time to the business organisation and marketing side of indie development. The low marketing budget and frequently lack of time put into marketing leads to potential players never hearing about the otherwise good games. This article explores if we can see and back this with data.

I am looking at c. 31,000 Steam games when doing this assay. I explain my methodologies in the stop of the article. I've then allocated these games into percentiles based on sales and summarised it in the graph beneath.

How much money practise Steam games make?

Have-aways:

• Bottom 13% of Steam games are gratuitous.
• 14% of paid games accept earned less than $one,000 in their lifetime.
• Well-nigh half of Steam games have never made more than $5,000.
• Only 25% of the games take made more than than $50,000.
• Top 10% of games or c. 3,100 games on Steam have made more than $430,000. We're at present getting into really successful indie game and AA and AAA games territory.
• The pinnacle one% of Steam games make more than $25,000,000 per game on Steam alone.

Revenue expectations on self-published indie games

The insight above gives a practiced overview of how savage the game industry is and how rewarding it can be to be the peak 1%. However, it as well includes the AA and AAA games with $100m budgets on development and marketing. I wanted to see how this looks when nosotros only await at cocky-published indie games. This reduces our sample size to c. 21,000 games.

The shape of the curve remains very similar, but the calibration has changed drastically.

Lesser 50% now make less than $4,000 rather than $v,000 per game.

Top 25% of self-published indie games acquirement expectations have almost halved to $26,000. You'll have to be in the top quartile if you want to brand more than than that every bit an indie dev.

Pinnacle 14 % – This is the threshold of crossing $100k gross revenue line. C. 3,000 self-published indie games have made over $100k gross revenue on Steam. That's a bigger number than I idea. Steam is 17 years old, but the majority of games have been posted in the concluding 5-6 years. That's effectually 500 indie games per year that cross $100k marker. Smashing.

Top 10% earn more than than $187,000

The elevation 1% of indie games have earned more than $7,000,000. That'south c. 200 self-published indie games that have made it. These are mega pop games like Subnautica and Rimworld that accept made well over a $100m in revenue equally well as games like Plague Inc, Don't Starve, Orcs Must Die! ii, etc that take even so made tens of millions of dollars each. They're very rarely teams of less than 5, but almost always teams of less than 40 people. This is more $175,000 per employee, in some cases millions of dollars per employee.

To learn more about revenue potential of dissimilar games, visit our costless platform.

Practise earnings differ by game genre?

Looking at the revenue distribution past genre shows some interesting patterns.

A lot of MMO games (eg Paths of Exile) are free to play, so their revenue is not estimated in this case. Casual games also brand almost of their revenue from in-app purchases and are priced very low, often $0.99. When looking at more standard acquirement model genres, RPG, simulation and strategy games are the highest earning for indie categories.

Even in the RPG genre, with the highest proportion of high earning games, simply well-nigh 30% of the games make $fifty,000 or more and over one-half of the games never make more than than $x,000.

Takeaways

Information technology is incredibly hard to earn any substantial revenue from games every bit an indie developer. Keep in heed, that the figures stated higher up are gross acquirement. This is before discounts, game returns and a 30% Steam cut gets taken off it, not even talking about taxes.

All the same, the pinnacle indie games have not just managed generate a lot of revenue, they have become platforms to launch futurity games from. Being in the top 10% of games is non simply about luck. In fact, there are some pretty concrete steps that near indie developers often condone. One of them is doing market inquiry and competitor benchmarking to sympathize what the customers want, what the market is defective and what the top devs are doing right.

The indie developers that take done well, accept typically consistently connected to practice well as they tackle all aspects of development, take various skillsets in the squad and have a well thought through marketing entrada with a lot of effort going into executing it. I already briefly touched on some characteristics of successful indie teams, but I will be looking into it in greater detail in my side by side articles – What makes a successful indie studio and what makes a successful indie game? These articles will explore how to recognise which games will show successful before release.

Methodology

This department explains the methodology used in my analysis, to find How much money exercise Steam games make? Since Steamspy has go a less accurate predictor of game revenues, a simple method has resurged in popularity – the Boxleiter method. It has been shown by several dissimilar datasets that on average a Steam game sells somewhere between 30-150 times their total amount of Steam ratings. That's a large range, but gives the right ballpark effigy.

The median game's sales are effectually sixty times their total ratings. At present, it's definitely imperfect as a method to go whatsoever accuracy for a single game'due south earnings, just it works really well with larger sample sizes. I've applied it to all 41,000 Steam games to encounter the results. To make sure we're comparison relevant games, I'm just looking at games that are already released and non early access. I'thou likewise applying a dominion that they accept had to have at least one rating on Steam. This includes 31,000 games in the first sections of analysis.

Thanks for reading our commodity How much money do Steam games make? For more Gaming Insights from the experts visit Video Game Insights. Fore more than features on Indie Games visit the Into Indie Games features pages.

Source: https://www.intoindiegames.com/how-much-money-do-steam-games-make/

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