Inspired by true events from this morning
If a game gets lost in the steam store and no one ever plays it, was it ever a game at all?
I’m sure if you owed them 100 bucks they’d demand it
*$99
Perhaps that’s a $99 discount on the next amount owed?
Seen your meme during my lunch break doom scrolling on another site. Happy to see you are here on lemmy too!
Hey me too! I released my first game on Steam a month ago and by all objective measures it was a flop, but as a hobbyist I’m still proud of it. It honestly did better than I thought for a small niche game that I did a terrible job of marketing, and my one review so far was quite positive so I’ll count that as a small win as I move onwards to the next game.
What’s your game? Niche games are awesome. And if you made it with Godot I’m definitely interested.
you cant just SAY that and then not mention the game name
wow you really are bad at marketing
The eternal conflict between being an indie dev and not wanting to be a shill :'(
I get not saying the name in the top comment, but once people are interested the door is open.
What is the game? It’s not being a shill to answer questions.
This IS the game.
I lost the game.
itch.io once sent me 4$
I used to make mobile apps as a hobby and I still get the weekly report of my dwindling numbers.
How do you get into this? Could you DM me the info and perhaps a good starting place? I can’t work right now due to an injury and I’d love to look into this
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).
Does Wishlisting a game help the developer in anyway other than indicating excitement for a game?
I’d love to know if there an any incentive to interacting with a game’s store page other than buying a game, obviously.
If Steam gives a bonus for that kind of thing, I’m going to be a lot more generous with my clicks.
It definitely helps. Every dev I’ve heard talking about releasing a game stresses wishlisting. I forget why, unfortunately. It might make it more noticable, sort of like likensub on YouTube.
I do know that refunding a game is the absolute worst thing you can do to it.
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. :)
FYI you have a typo in your last screenshot (This sign m[a]y not…):
Arhgh missed that! Thank you so much!
Now you should name something Mynot
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?
yeah pretty much, if a ton of people wishlist a game it pops up more on the front pages of categories bc that means it’s rlly popular
I will advertise this to my friends, they have lots of young people in their circles that go through games at a good pace. This looks right up their alley.
WOW! Thank you so much! Word of mouth is important for small indie dev teams
My partner and I are both buying “Do Not Press The Button” as soon as it’s out. I’ve also told my friends about it lawl
Seems like our bag for sure.
The screenshots sell it well. That’s some funny stuff. I’ll check out the demo.
Thank you :)
I released a game like three years ago and it’s earned $97 in that time.
I feel your pain
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?
@KeefChief13@lemmy.world @Amanduh@lemm.ee @indomara@lemmy.world 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.
shoot your friends
Done. Will you now tell me what it’s called?
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.
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.
Whats the game
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.
My bank: “We have a new valuation on your home! Open your app to see it!”
…
“It’s down 2%!”
hah same energy
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely. It’s got to be the way it is. Just kinda feels bad at first
It accumulates
Other games include “be a rock” and “pizza synthwave” and this is the weird one.
Wish listed.
You raised my hopes, and dashed them quite expertly sir! Bravo!
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?
I want to note that you’d need about $143 in gross sales to meet the threshold of $100 in net profit.
On the surface that sounds like a lot. But, they’re providing a service without any guarantee of any income. Epic can only compete because they’ve few users and are willing to operate at a near loss in attempt to garner market share.
This will be a difficult one for others to understand as a “good deal”. Gamers are usually correct when they pull out their pitchforks. This should not be one of those times.
While I’m no fan of Epic Games for bribing companies to keep games off of Steam for a year or more, Valve’s market dominance in PC game sales isn’t a good thing for developers or consumers.
Competition in capitalism is always better than a lack thereof. But, we’ve not busted monopolies in a significant way since Ma Bell. And, even if we were, at 75% of the global market share they’d not warrant any action yet.
There’s going to be a dominant organization because late stage capitalism sucks. And, I’d rather it be Valve than some alternative trying to fuck me over at every opportunity.
Steam only charges that for larger developers though iirc
I see you settled on a design for the toaster. Love the mustache.
Thank you : )
Whats the game? :)
don’t make shitty asset flips then
I feel you, on Twitch is 50$.
How do people make money there?
They don’t. Their payouts leaked a couple years ago, of the thousands of streamers there’s a few hundred that make minimum wage or better. This pattern holds true for YouTube, only fans, etc.
It’s way more than a few hundred. What leaked was the twitch subscriber payout, which doesn’t count all the money spent on bits. Then there’s also sponsorships and youtube content.
I follow several Path of Exile streamers, and when that released they said that that was not the total payout. They usually do some video guides of builds for the game that, alongside twitch generates content for them. Then there’s also sponsors for gaming rigs and other kind of stuff, sponsors to try new games… Maybe it’s PoE specifically but even streamers that oscillate between 200-800, maybe 1k viewers when there’s no other PoE streamer online earned more that minimum wage with just the twitch payout (given the country they live in ofc).
How often are those small streamers the only one though? Having times where you do almost ok aren’t that great if you make nothing 30% of your streaming time.
For every streamer that makes minimum wage there are dozens that make so little they don’t even get paid.
I can’t even begin to understand how hard it is to make it on Twitch. I assume probably the top 1000 streamers make the real money and the rest 99,5% probably make like $50 per month…
I streamed for like a year and a half+ and I only managed to reach the 50$ treshold to cash out 2 times, so yeah, it’s very rough.
Do they just, make the money disappear if you don’t reach the 50 or do they add up till you reach 50?
I streamed for 2 years and I got 5 viewers at once that one time my friend raided me. I’m not fit for human consumption.
For most people, it’s a hobby for fun, not a job.
Those that want to make a job out of it tend to spread out the content creation to youtube and tiktok, and often sponsorships fill in the gaps.
The ones that actually make a decent living only from streaming are a fraction of one percent.
subscribers and something called bits of which i dont know the purpose.
Bits are basically donations.
They don’t seem to have an issue sending $10 refunds to my bank account, I wonder how much it actually costs them
Complete guess here, but refunds are probably handled differently by the banks compared to new payments, i.e. undoing an error is probably free(ish), but paying people is how they get you
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’ve been waiting like 20 years for my money from NewGrounds. I was at $80 last time I checked a while ago.
Do they just keep your earning in your account until one month your total outstanding earnings breach the 100$ 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.
