Inspired by true events from this morning
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.
Absolutely. It’s got to be the way it is. Just kinda feels bad at first
It accumulates
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%.
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.
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.
Yeah! Other publishers should open their own stores and compete!
…
Oh wait no fuck oh god oh what have we done
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.
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 see you settled on a design for the toaster. Love the mustache.
Thank you : )
Other games include “be a rock” and “pizza synthwave” and this is the weird one.
Wish listed.
Since i’m a sucker for weird games and very bad at following simple rules i wishlisted your new game lol
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
Whats the game? :)
I’m sure if you owed them 100 bucks they’d demand it
*$99
Fairly certain I’ve bought a game that was like 34 cents or something. I definitely charged me the 34 cents.
My bank: “We have a new valuation on your home! Open your app to see it!”
…
“It’s down 2%!”
hah same energy
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).
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
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!
Wish listed! Also bought Be a Rock, I look forward to being a rock later tonight, it sounds fantastic!
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. :)
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I guess I shouldn’t be expected to pay for games until my total is over a hundred bucks then?
No you pay a financial service provider who pays Steam in bulk once a month. So yes same principle applies.
shouldn’t those service providers wait until the total is $100 before they started to receive my money due to cost associated to sending and receiving money then?
The service providers are the ones who dictate the costs. They provide the infrastructure. The costs for these kind of transactions are much much lower because of economy of scale they handle millions of transactions per day across all their clients. Because they handle so many transactions they can charge a small percentage fee. The loss they make on small transactions they will make up with bigger transactions.
While Steam uses a normal bank transactions to pay developers, because many of them are in the hundreds of thousands and some are in the millions of dollars so you don’t want to have a third party handling those that asks a percentage fee. You’d rather just pay the fixed fee the bank charges per transaction. Since it is cheaper for those large transactions. That fee can be $10-$20 especially on international transactions. That’s why Steam waits till that money is above a $100. And using a third party to handle those small transactions wouldn’t be worth the hassle. The percentage fee would be high anyway because of the low volume.
Bruh, don’t give them ideas for the next price hike!
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.
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
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 $1 of use out of it.
If a game gets lost in the steam store and no one ever plays it, was it ever a game at all?
Nope just someone’s crushed hopes and dreams at that point lol
I feel you, on Twitch is 50$.
How do people make money there?
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?
They save it.
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).
For every streamer that makes minimum wage there are dozens that make so little they don’t even get paid.
It’s still more than a few hundred. I don’t remember how big the leaked doc was but it wasn’t in the thousands, it was bigger. Your statement can be true while the statement of the one I responded to be incorrect at the same time.
I mean, you comment is true and refutes nothing I said.
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.
Given that the leak was the annual earnings from subs your question is irrelevant since it shows that the total average amounts enough.
I used to make mobile apps as a hobby and I still get the weekly report of my dwindling numbers.
They don’t seem to have an issue sending $10 refunds to my bank account, I wonder how much it actually costs them
Especially when they’re making bank charging 30%.
The bigger cost is probably the processing time, limiting to $100 probably drops the number of payments by 80%.
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.
My experience every month.
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
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.
