Inspired by true events from this morning
I’ve been waiting like 20 years for my money from NewGrounds. I was at $80 last time I checked a while ago.
if this is true I’d recommend sending GamersNexus an email with the details as they might be able to help considering their past actions to hold companies accountableEdit:
Steam policy rip, see comments down belowIt’s true, but it’s Steam policy. If you haven’t reached the threshold for the month, you are not getting a payment. I guess I just have to sell more games and do better next time. I mean with Steam Sale events I will probably get there eventually.
It’s true, but it’s Steam policy. If you haven’t reached the threshold for the month, you are not getting a payment.
damn, guess that’s just how it is if you want to sell games on Steam I guess then :/
It’s the same on epic, $100 minimum payout.
I released a game like three years ago and it’s earned $97 in that time.
I feel your pain
Tell us the game now.
Concord
Whats the game? :)
If you roughly convert your hourly salary, how much money did you spend working on this game?
If we were to compare it to our day jobs, the opportunity cost for the team and me would probably be around ten grand.
If we compare the time spent to the money earned, then we’re each worth several cents an hour.
It’s a good thing I didn’t get into game dev for the money, it seems I’m quite bad at it
Revenue divided by time is a depressing metric for anyone who starts trying to monetize their hobby, but that’s not the point. Do your fun project because it’s fun. If you make enough to cash out on Steam, get yourselves some actual trophies. Or pizza. Trying to make money will force you to do all the depressing capitalist things the big studios do, and then it’s not fun anymore.
Buy it yourself, get over 100, cash out
Haha, I’ve considered it. I’d really like to at least be able to buy pizza for the gang who helped make the game.
Which game is it?
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Thank you all so much for your interest! :)
The game is called Shoot Your Friends. It’s a death match couch game for 2-4 players who share a screen and pilot tanks around an arena.
Please be aware that it is somewhat niche, it’s only compatible with controllers and local multiplayer. But if you ever get the gang over for game night it can be a fun way to spend the evening.
I don’t use a controller, but I bought two copies for friends that do! Keep going, make more games, add features! (Like maybe keyboard controls for us dinosaurs.)
I believe in you!
Oh my gosh, thank you so much!
Keyboard support is definitely a must for our other games. I’m becoming more aware of the importance of accessibility.
Looks like fun, I’ll play it with my kids!
shoot your friends
Done. Will you now tell me what it’s called?
Steam Deck support?
I’m afraid not, this came out well before the deck and I can’t afford one to test on.
I’m not sure that it’s a good target for the deck anyway where it’s a splitscreen game.
I too, played “Combat” on Atari.
Whats the game
Do they just keep your earning in your account until one month your total outstanding earnings breach the 100$ threshold and you’ll receive all your earning in one transaction or does this money get swallowed by steam?
I think they keep your money until reach the threshold. Steam aren’t scummy so I’m pretty sure there is no shady stuff going on with your money.
Yeah i was about to ask that. If they just took all amounts below 100 for themselves that would be super fucked up and probably illegal.
I have lots of bills that are less than that every month, and yet somehow I can’t just say they’re not worth paying…
I am guessing you dont have service providers from all over the globe with international transaction fees
If I did I’d probably have lots of little satellite offices in various regions to make that easier.
Cheaper this way. Clearly you don’t business. /s
Seen your meme during my lunch break doom scrolling on another site. Happy to see you are here on lemmy too!
don’t make shitty asset flips then
Happens to me almost every month. Good thing I didn’t quit my day job.
Out of curiosity, have you had some big pay days? Or just enough to treat yourself?
I don’t think I ever got more than $200 in a month. But I keep the money in a separate account and only use it for game dev or business stuff.
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.
On my personal AWS account, Im paying them 0.17 cents a month.
I wonder if they pay a fee since it’s hooked into my credit card.
0.17 cents
So is that less than a cent or is it 17 cents? If it’s the former, I don’t think it’s even possible to make a transaction that small.
They’re bigger so it’s hard to know, but it’s usually something like 2.9% + 10c a transaction.
At their scale though who knows
Only in us tho. I think eu has it set to percantage only.
Once a month I’d have to pay a few pennies to Google for our cloud use at a school district I worked for. It always baffled me!
Policy schmolicy. Withholding even one cent you are owed is fucking shitty.
This sort of thing is pretty common in various industries, they let the money accumulate until it reaches a threshold.
Common doesn’t mean not shitty
Costs more than a cent to male the transaction
What if they female it? It should cost 0.7 cents.
That’s their problem
Hey me too! I released my first game on Steam a month ago and by all objective measures it was a flop, but as a hobbyist I’m still proud of it. It honestly did better than I thought for a small niche game that I did a terrible job of marketing, and my one review so far was quite positive so I’ll count that as a small win as I move onwards to the next game.
By the way, here’s the game for anyone interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2792160/SnowDown/
I didn’t expect to see so many replies!
This is super cute! If I buy these now for my friends and family but set it to deliver the gift near Christmas, would you get the money now? Or not til Christmas?
This looks perfect for when everyone is over on Christmas eve! <3
I’m glad you like it! I actually made my first prototype right before last Christmas so I could play it when my family got together, and people enjoyed it so much I just kept working on it.
As far as gifting goes, I actually didn’t know you could get Steam gifts that deliver later, so I’m not entirely sure of the answer, but I assume if they charge you for the game right away it would process the payment then too.
Full disclosure though, only one person needs a copy of the game to run it and play with a group. Everyone joins the game by visiting a website (generally on their phone), similar to how Jackbox games work. So there’s no obligation to gift copies, but if you still do I will be quite honored and grateful!
Aww, you’re adorable. I will buy the games closer to Christmas for everyone, my reading tells me that if I buy the game and the person does not accept the gift then they will give me a refund, so I imagine you won’t get the money until everyone accepts.
this is unexpected, i was expecting a COD type game but instead it has penguins and you’re supposed to have friends
Reminds me of some of the old school flash multiplayer games
Got it on follow, if I ever get a house with a better Internet connection I’ll give it a shot and leave a review
As someone who is also awkwardly treading the line between being a soulless hack and trying to get my work noticed by literally anyone: please edit your top comment with a link to your game.
I mean it. I can’t even muster the courage to post my renders to Instagram without feeling like some desperate influencer goof.
Bro this is literally all in your head. 99.9 don’t give a fuck what you do or don’t do, either positively or negatively.
I’d you want to show it, show it. If you want to keep it for you, keep it. But it’s not about other people. It’s about you making YOUR choice.
you cant just SAY that and then not mention the game name
wow you really are bad at marketing
The eternal conflict between being an indie dev and not wanting to be a shill :'(
Trying to sell 'owt without becoming a sell-out.
What is the game? It’s not being a shill to answer questions.
I get not saying the name in the top comment, but once people are interested the door is open.
This IS the game.
I lost the game.
Fuck. I lost it too.
Oof, though you’re not wrong!
What’s your game? Niche games are awesome. And if you made it with Godot I’m definitely interested.
Here’s my game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2792160/SnowDown/
It’s a little action party game you can play with phones as controllers (similar to how you’d host a Jackbox game). And yes I did make it with Godot!
This looks perfect for office downtime with the team on slow days
Considering you’re a hobbyist and probably don’t have marketing, it’s too soon to say it’s a flop. Many games like that pop off later once it gets seen.
I appreciate the optimism! I hope it can find an audience over time, but it’s definitely tough to stand out. For now, I’m aiming to just keep making games and improving, rather than giving up after the first try, which sadly seems to happen a lot out there.
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.
*$99
Perhaps that’s a $99 discount on the next amount owed?
Jesus. This makes it reasonable to just buy $100 worth of your own game every month, just to make sure. Assuming that the number of real sales cover Valve’s percentage and then some. Yeah, that’s a non-zero opportunity cost for you, and additional float for Valve, however petty it may be. But for a small developer, maybe that makes sense.
You’d lose 30% on every self-sale. I can’t see how the numbers would work out
The break even point would be at a balance of 23.08$. 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.
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%.
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 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.
While I’m no fan of Epic Games for bribing companies to keep games off of Steam for a year or more, Valve’s market dominance in PC game sales isn’t a good thing for developers or consumers.
The thing is, steam’s market dominance is one of user choice rather than anticompetitive strategies or lack of alternatives. Steam doesn’t do exclusives, they don’t charge you for external sales, they don’t even prevent you from selling steam keys outside the platform, or users from launching non steam games in the client. The only real restriction is that access to steam services requires a license in the active steam account. Even valve-produced devices like the steam deck can install from other stores.
Sure, dominance is bad in an abstract theoretical way and it’d be nice if Gog, itch.io, etc were more competitive, but Steam is dominant because consumers actively choose it.
Competition in capitalism is always better than a lack thereof. But, we’ve not busted monopolies in a significant way since Ma Bell. And, even if we were, at 75% of the global market share they’d not warrant any action yet.
There’s going to be a dominant organization because late stage capitalism sucks. And, I’d rather it be Valve than some alternative trying to fuck me over at every opportunity.
Other games include “be a rock” and “pizza synthwave” and this is the weird one.
Wish listed.
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
Youtube and twitch work this same way. When I was starting there were months where I didnt make any money because I didn’t meet the minimum. Hoping next month meets the requirement for you boss 🙏
Does the balance at least accumulate until you do hit the threshold, or is the money just gone?
It accumulates, so there is no money lost. It does kinda suck though that as you start, even though you can make money and did make a bit you don’t get to see it yet
It does make sense from a payment processing standpoint. It doesn’t make sense to spend more money on creating the transaction than is actually being sent.
I used to pay a particular company by purchase order for this exact reason. CC takes 2-3% of the payment, but purchase order - they’ve got to get themselves into the company system, track the PO, invoice, track the payment…at the time, a common estimate was $50 to process a PO, and if you’re only buying $100 batches, that’s a big hit. Did not like that company, but they were the only place to get whatever it was I had to buy.
Absolutely. It’s got to be the way it is. Just kinda feels bad at first
Sending a simple transaction like this costs a couple cents though, which they could in theory bill to the developer as well. Setting the threshold at 100 is probably more to accrue additional interest on Steams bank accounts.
I think in the US I’ve heard ETF/ACH transaction fees are usually around $2.50? It might be possible to have that apply across a batch, though, as in if you submit 10 payments to 10 different people as a single transaction it’s still just $2.50, or 25¢ per person. I’m only getting this from hearing accountants complain at companies I’ve worked with, so I don’t understand the details. But I’ve seen it pretty common with companies doing payouts to want to see a minimum amount before they actually send the payment, otherwise it’s not worth doing.
It accumulates
Whats the game? :)
I see you settled on a design for the toaster. Love the mustache.
Thank you : )
You raised my hopes, and dashed them quite expertly sir! Bravo!
If a game gets lost in the steam store and no one ever plays it, was it ever a game at all?
Nope just someone’s crushed hopes and dreams at that point lol
