Hey everyone,

I wanted to get an idea as to what experiences you have had regarding selling/monetizing a finished game. I know many of us are doing it for a passion/hobby or perhaps a full-time job but, I want to get a sense of the money the average game makes on the different platforms and, which monetization strategy was used (paid upfront, in app purchases or adverts on mobile platforms).

My gut feel is that there are so much garbage on the mobile stores and platforms like steam, that it might mean the overwhelming majority of indie games are stillborn. I also tend to favour good old-fashioned paid upfront games but with my aforementioned comment on so much garbage and asset-flips in stores, people probably don't like that strategy, especially in the mobile market.

Please share your thoughts and experiences.

-Cheers

Your gut instinct is completely right, I hope that the Godot mods won't mind me having a rant but I'll try and keep it professional here because of the nature of this forum. I'll be blunt though, I feel like steam has lost a lot of it's clout these days, it's not a place for indie games to sell their titles anymore, it's a place for people as you point out to asset flip games and post up what I call meme games that usually have a flurry of excitement for about two weeks and then everybody forgets it ever existed.

To add insult to injury, even after all this time, you still have to pay an upfront fee of £70 odd just to even list your game, meaning you're in the red before you even get any sales. That hurts an indie dev looking to make a name for themselves, it might not seem that much if you're lucky enough to already have a significant following but very often uploading to steam is one of the only ways you can get noticed. These days though? I think you're right, I think there's too much garbage flooding that platform and too many meme games, but not only that the steam reviews have now turned to garbage as well. Instead of it being any plays to get reliable feedback I'm 99% sure a lot of the reviews are scammers, bots, angry people ( Sometimes justifiably so ) and people reposting memes that you may have found funny a few years ago but it gets tedious seeing them every single time on every single steam game. Even being a customer is pretty annoying on steam because you look up the reviews hoping to get some kind of proper feedback and it's just idiots posting crap on there the majority of the time unless they've played the game and are mad about it.

I highly, highly recommend putting your game on itch.io, it will save you a lot of agony, not only that the back end of itch.io is very straightforward compared to steam. I found it incredibly annoying to deal with whereas with itch you just upload your game, select your price, fill out the information and then click upload, wonderfully painless.

Business wise as well I find itch is better, you have a higher percentage, I believe the default is 90% to you, 10% to itch, whereas with steam it's 70% to you and 30% to them. With itch as well you can do proper DRM free releases compared to steam where you're required to have that server in order to download.

https://itch.io/updates/introducing-open-revenue-sharing

I hope this information helps, I strongly recommend going with Itch over Steam because that's what I'm doing now, I've gotten pretty fed up with that platform overall and I don't want to be a part of the problem of why there aren't enough legit competitors out there offering alternatives to platforms like steam. I just thought I'd post some proper personal experience on what I've been finding out as what I would call myself a startup indie dev.

Itch is great. They have a much more fair system, and lower budget indie games seem to do better (whereas Steam is catered to AAA developers). I've seen some pretty basic looking games, stuff that is not hard to make, get a lot of popularity on Itch. However, the audience is much smaller. For my demos, I released on both Itch and Steam, and the traffic and downloads on Steam were about 10x compared to Itch. It's just much bigger. So if you want to make a lot of money, you won't do that without being on Steam. However, Itch is more friendly to beginner developers, and also actually believes in free speech, so they allow more off-beat content. Steam says they allow everything, but they are lying, they ban and remove content all the time. Though it probably makes sense to launch on Itch first, build a name for yourself, and then do Steam (or consoles) later if your game is popular.

    cybereality I don't even think steam is a place to sell AAA games anymore these days really, their store page can get pretty obnoxious with their promotions and their recommendations system is annoying. I'm convinced that they're doing manual curation because it doesn't respect your filters very much and if you've bought or own titles on a different platform for example you can't filter those out to stop being recommended them.

    I've actually done some real market research on steam lately just because I was wondering if I was being paranoid. The OP isn't wrong, any decent indie games on steam unless they get some special attention from the steam community are lost in a sea of asset flip and meme games or you've got the publishers trying to sell their AAA titles that they've clearly paid steam extra ad money for.

    I keep on earnestly wanting steam to impress me but the only thing valve seems truly interested in is selling their steam deck console. I think even a fairly well established game unless they do a positive review bomb on steam release is going to struggle because the market is so over-saturated with meh games at the moment. Not just that too, at least for me, steam is regularly kicking up games that were released back in 2017.

      Well Steam does have a recommender that works, but it's in beta, though it's a real algorithm. However, it seems to favor big titles, you can decide for yourself if developers pay for that. However, I know basically for a fact that the "games like this" is fake. You can see games that are totally unrelated listed, and games that should be there are not. So most likely manual. I could write a better algorithm in a couple hours, so clearly it's not a mistake.

      Steam is a totalitarian company. It has complete control over its users. Both the game developers and the players. I don't really understand its popularity and how anyone can use it.

      Right, Steam is basically a DRM platform. First and foremost, it's DRM. And people don't notice. They also slam Epic for having exclusives, but Steam has a ton of exclusives. Try buying Half-Life 2 on GoG or anywhere else. Even non Valve games (like big AAA titles) are only on Steam. Even the "boxed" version is simply an empty cardboard box with a Steam key code. It's not a good situation. Though it's unlikely Valve would go out of business, Gabe could punk us all tomorrow and turn off the servers and we would all lose thousands of dollars worth of games with no way to get them back.

        cybereality I'm glad you get it CyberReality, that gives me hope for this engine because when dealing with new software or even a new site or platform I always check to see if people can see the woods for the trees or not. It's surprising how often people who should know better just don't get how some businesses operate on the back end. Free speech is very important to me and especially after seeing how Unity got hijacked through it's auto-update system by a political activist I'm very wary now about what I install on my machine.

          Well, I won't claim to speak for all Godot users. But I do a lot of research, and I'm careful about who or what I support. Like I was using Unity for a while. Then they made an update (which happened automatically) and it uploaded all of my projects to a cloud server. Now, it's not like I was doing anything secret or illegal. But, on principle, some company should not be remotely accessing and downloading private files from my "personal" computer. So that is when I stopped using Unity. Also, around that time, I started learning Linux, cause I got fed up with it.

          I can make a very easy argument against all that nonsense that's even better than privacy, corporate espionage. It would be so easy for rogue employees to peak at your work and steal your ideas and code, then profit off it but that's another rant for a different thread.

          I want to thank all of you for the feedback and opinions. This conversation has given me a lot of food for thought and I am not really sure whether I want to actually take the time to build my first game without getting some return on it.
          I know it sounds a little bit like something a college graduate would say but, my day time IT job pays well but takes a lot of my personal time to upkeep, so I don't really want to spend 2 years+ of my life to deliver the game I want to make, and have it being a complete time waste financially. I know it is about passion too but, my reality and family responsibility (I got 2 kids) has some weight in my decision to how I spend my time.

          I will think long and hard on this.

          Well, if you want to pay your bills, just get a normal job. You might even make more money doing traditional IT / business app development rather than game programming. Designing games is an art form, and like making music or drawing, lots of people are trying and most don't make any money. The ones that do hit it big are millionaires, but it's a small chance, unless you already have a ton of experience. Making a hit game on your first game is almost impossible. So the smartest thing to do is not quit your day job, and just work on games as a hobby, until you think you have enough skill to do it professionally.

          I think it's also worth pointing out that unless you're a lunatic like me another smart thing to do would be to would be to really downsize your projects, you are not going to make the next Halo or big open world game on your first try. Even I thought I was being sensible when I focused on just making a very basic platformer but that was quite a struggle for me as a beginner. Now I'm settled into the Godot engine I could probably whip a fairly decent one up within a couple of months but the size of your project should never be underestimated.

          Now I disagree that 2D is generally 'easier' than 3D, it depends entirely on what you're making and what your goals are but I'd say what ever you're probably thinking of you should downsize to about 1/5th of that. You also need to take into account things like art, sound and music as well. For the record, none of this is meant to discourage anyone from being a game dev or making games, it's just when it comes to projects and actually putting them out there and making money you have to be very grounded in reality.

          Again, thanks as these are the real conversations that one needs to have to live in the real world of what to expect. For some context, I am a seasoned software developer (Microsoft Stack mostly so Godot C# is what I have adopted) and so far the learnings have been fairly straight forward. Admittedly, it is a whole different ball game than commercial software and yes, more of an art form.

          The reality here is that I am weighing options in my head of just going ahead and building yet another business app with the hopes of making some passive income, or try something 'fun' and do the same with a game. Nothing too fancy, 2D top down RPG) but, as Lethn has alluded to, would probably explode in workload as I have seen how much work it is and have barely completed 2 levels, without sound et al. I was hoping to build a 2d top down RPG that is inspired by old-school games like Buck Rogers and Countdown to Doomstay. Was a lot of fun back in the day...but I might be out of touch with the current-day gamer. (I probably am)

          It would be a bit of a hobby, but I would prefer that it makes money. I have absolutely no intention of becoming a 'game developer' or leaving my day job as I am very successful. I just don't want to throw away the game after 2 years just because the style of game I plan on, would just not be what any mobile platform player or any other would pay $$ for...or that I chose the wrong platform or monetization scheme. If the game doesn't account for at least 25k after 2-3 years of effort of work, I probably would not bother. But trying to do any form or projections would probably be a lot more easy if I can find similar projects and measure their success/effort. Something I would still need to do, but just wanted to hear from the pros here
          🙂

          In terms of what game you want to make and 'throwing it away after 2 years' I completely understand, if you go into games development it is a very good idea to focus entirely on genres you really, really enjoy playing otherwise you'll burn out on a long term project fast. I have a fairly wide range of games I enjoy but it surprised me finding out I wasn't into platformers as I thought I was. As a result with my game dev I'm focusing on shooters, RTS' and RPGs, gotta have that pew pew otherwise I'm not satisfied 😃

          I have heard Epic has a better percentage rate for developers, has anyone posted there?
          And what about GOG? I use them WAY more than Steam these days.

            SnapCracklins And what about GOG?

            GOG on this list is probably the most decent… if we can talk about decency here at all…

              GOG have been caught doing censorship and being dodgy about handling money so I'm definitely advocating for itch really, I am also not a great fan of CD Projekt Red these days.