Indies rejoice! Wait..

Data is sexy

How is $10K in two weeks a baseline for any form of financial success? Could we see the same cuts of data for $100K? $500K? $1M? What percentages of titles released on the platform in a given year do these number of titles represent? Is that percentage climbing or declining? Is it just that more titles are being released and thus more titles are crossing these thresholds?

I don't know, you can make like 13 games in the course of 3 years and not even come close to 10,000 dollars. Try like under 300 in the first two weeks (If lucky) for most indie devs out there.

I assume the bottom 25th percentile earning less is only due to the increase in shovelware.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/blog/2020/new_releases

$10,000 if maybe I added them all up together haha.

indies continue getting screwed with the new visibility stuff from sept 2018. I used to make on average about $1200 per month. I now make about a 6th of that.

also, the sheer amount of shovelware is absolutely ridiculous.

2019:
$earning - GreenLight / Direct
$250K - 150 games (total: ?) / 275 games (total: ~10K games - 2019); - 2.75%
$100K - 230 games (total: ?) / 425 games (total: ~10K games - 2019); - 4.25%
$50K - 325 games (total: ?) / 600 games (total: ~10K games - 2019); - 6%
$10K - 525 games (total: ?) / 1200 games (total: ~10K games - 2019); - 12%
$5K - 550 games (total: ?) / 1500 games (total: ~10K games - 2019); - 15%

What are you hiding by using raw counts of games instead of percents throughout? How are you accounting for sheer volume of games published now that you have Direct. Not believing those linear trendlines reflect the actual structural change in the ecosystem.

I feel this doesn't address the core question about Direct which is the *ratio* of games achieving success. Nobody thought that the number of games getting over 10k would decrease with more games, that makes little sense. We, as devs, can accept Direct being a thing, that's fine, what we want to know however is how to make our game successful and what are our odds and how can we increase them?

So a better writeup to address those concerns would say something like:
- Success at different levels (10k, 25k, 50k, etc.) vs Price of the game
- How many of those are self-published and how many are tied with a publisher
- Language/Platform breakdown
- Effect of using different steam tools

A great example of an effective breakdown is this page:

https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

This tells you all you need to know about how to successfully work with the KS platform and build strategies. But with Steam I feel we're always flying blind, and this article doesn't really help in that regard.

Originally posted by Corrosion:

indies continue getting screwed with the new visibility stuff from sept 2018. I used to make on average about $1200 per month. I now make about a 6th of that.

The first two weeks of fast sales are ended.

I'm going to be a little bit more upfront, seeing some of the comments on Twitter.

The current system is far too heavily weighted towards hobbyist projects, and 1-2 person Indie games have seen a steep drop in median yearly/lifetime earnings.

This weighting is very surprising since its clear from the way that the store algorithms have been setup that bigger, higher-quality, 'live-service' games are the focus on Steam.

These kind of games are definitely possible for Indies to make, and those that do make them are well rewarded, but they require 2-3 person teams minimum, bigger budgets, and more operational sophistication.

The submission process needs to be updated to actually indicate to developers in advance what kind of games Steam wants to show and sell to customers. Its been suggested before, but this could just be as simple as changing the $100 fee to $500 or $1000. Alternatively or additionally, requiring submission from registered corporations instead of individuals. With these kind of steps in place we could look at bringing back Trading Cards and Global Achievements, or some other perks.

(And before I receive any accusations of being an elite Westerner, I live in the poorest country in the EU - these figures and requirements are still completely reasonable for a commercial project even from here)

Otherwise right now its essentially impossible to make a living on Steam as a solo developer. You either need to have an established reputation (from the days before Steam Direct), have Mike Rose as your publisher, or release on multiple platforms.

If we are going to keep the system and submission process as-is, the 25% commission tier should be extended down from $10m to $10,000, to reflect the much greater amount of advertising, data analytics, and marketing expenses that we are faced with in a post-Direct era.

Indie games are hard to sell because they have a lower conversion to sales whereas Steam's algorithms are designed for high conversion and fast sales.
$500 fee will not help fix it.
P.S. Obviously, the sales algorithm for AAA games and the sales algorithm for indie games cannot be the same.