Game Developer Reveals How Much A Popular Steam Game Makes

I saw a really interesting video today from a game developer that dives deep into the financials of developing a game they show the exact amount of money that their game has made where it all comes from how it all works and it was really eye openening it feels like often times people treat game development the same way they treat the Bible they've never read it yet they pretend to be an expert on it so I've seen so many times like a game's doing somewhat well on Steam with a lot of downloads and people start spouting

about how it's a giant cash grab and they're making millions of dollars like Mr Krabs off it this and that even though they don't know anything about it but they cosplaying as the accountant for this indie game and this game developer had a very successful game at least in my opinion in terms of downloads 750,000 downloads and hearing that number I imagine most of you picture this guy's got bags of money but that's just not the reality of it hey I'm Alex and just some background so you understand these stats this is paint Warfare It's

a free FPS game with about 750,000 downloads and in the game there's microtransactions so you can buy DLC bundles from 2 to 5 us and coins which you can use to buy hats and skins for the guns in game the reviews are also super positive this is banad Dev talking about paint Warfare a passion project he developed over the course of thousands of hours he followed a very standard free-to-play model you know this is the kind of stuff Ubisoft and EA has wet dreams about it's just run-of-the-mill normal free-to-play microtransactions where it's DLC cosmetics and

in-game purchases he's not trying to reinvent the condom here it is a tried andrue method and with 750,000 downloads while having microtransactions I imagine most of you assume that this was a home run he hit it out of the park financially so over a total of four years of release the game has made $ 4,672 us gross and offsh your local taxes like Vats GST and also return returns this comes out to $$ 3,812 and then steam takes a 30% cut so the total revenue I take home is $2,668 us40 $2,680 over the course of

4 years is shockingly low you would make more money if you sat outside of Walmart collecting loose change that fell out of people's pockets you could upload a 45 second clip from a Family Guy haha moment on YouTube and probably make more an ad Revenue over the course of 4 years than he did over the course of thousands of hours of Dev time now in terms of counting how much work I put into the game Steam actually tracks the amount of time I spend in the game or developing the game in unity with steam open

so that comes out to 3512 hours but this doesn't count the time spent in unity developing the game before I released on Steam 3,000 hours of death time so in total this works out to around 42 cents per hour 42 cents an hour you could lick the toilet seats clean at a gas station and get paid more than that it's super sad because he poured thousands of hours into this game now he's looking at it very optimistically about the skill set that he was able to get through this project and also everything he learned from

it so it's not like it's all a big negative experience in fact he looks at it with pretty positive perspective though he does mention this yeah I'm not going to lie this is pretty sad if I spent this time working at McDonald's as minimum wage which is $24.10 Australian or around 16 USD per hour I would be sitting at like 48,000 USD as opposed to 1,276 now the 1,200 number that he's using here is after he took out his expenses because it's not like the developing the game was free he had to pay for servers

he also paid for some assets so he did have expenses so in total the take-home was $1,200 is over the course of 4 years when I was watching this video it really opened my third eye to the reality of game development for a lot of developers of course I'm not you know the biggest Neanderthal in the world I always understood that not only is game development very hard but it is very risky and it is hard to make like a living off it but I was always under the the impression that if your downloads got

into like the hundreds of thousands you were pretty successful you were going to make money off of that when that's just not the reality of it at all and I know I'm definitely guilty of doing the same [ __ ] a lot of other people do where I pretend to understand the intricacies of game development and the financials behind it sticking my pinky out well actually it is extremely greedy of them to be charging $2 for this hotsun Miku underwear package when clearly they're generating millions of dollars per day with their fart tokens when the

Ruby Tuesday truth of it all is I've never opened Unreal Engine I've never poked around in unity I've never released a game how the [ __ ] would I know I don't have like an actual educated perspective on it it'd be like asking my dad his perspective on the new One Piece manga chapter but now after seeing it from banan Dev it starts to paint a pretty clear picture of just how difficult it is to make a sustainable living from game development as like an indie Dev and also why so many Studio take the safest

most generic formulaic games and push them forward because they know there is a built-in audience for it for example Ubisoft open worlds I am beyond exhausted of them I know a lot of people are but there's a lot of people who aren't who don't mind getting fed the same vegetables over and over again it's something that's comforting and something that's familiar to them so they will keep playing and buying the open world Ubisoft Adventures or really lack thereof an adventure and while I think everyone always understood why there's such an emphasis on microtransactions being shoved

up the butthole of every game that comes out I do think this shows just how important that is which is why they come up with schemes to get more people enticed into purchasing such as putting things behind a pay wall or making a grind for earning in-game currency a [ __ ] grind where it has to be like a full-time job to accumulate enough of the currency to make that purchase without paying real money for it it's all designed to get you to spend money on it because the game is free and they need to

make something back on it and I always assume this worked extremely well for pretty much any game I just if there's a lot of downloads and there's micros in my noodle I always just connected dots that oh there's definitely going to be a sizable chunk of people buying those microtransactions but after seeing it here with 750,000 downloads and $2,600 it's clear that is just not always the case now let's break this down so the game was payto playay in the first year of release it was around $5 excluding sales so during its payto playay stage

it sold $594 and now it's free to play and it's making about 1,166 USD after all the cuts and fees per year so the game wasn't always free to play it started as a pay-to-play game with like a $5 cost which he then dropped to I think it was four and then eventually threee and it looked like judging by the graph that took place over the course of like almost almost a year a little less than a year and he made about 600 bucks from that so going free to play he did make more money

from the DLC sales but the Chess Master Charles can't help but wonder if he had kept it at like a $3 price tag for this game would he have ended up making more money in the long term and less downloads because the downloads didn't translate to you know Oodles of cash or anything would it have been more financially viable to keep this as a pay-to-play game and instead just try and make more people aware of its existence as opposed to trying to get it to foster a community through a large number of downloads by being

free to play and hoping that they spend money on the Skins clearly I don't know the answer to that I do know though that a lot of Gamers treat the words freet to playay like poison like they do not like it because it reminds them of very greedy corporations that exploit the model so there's a lot of times where something being freeo play can actually be somewhat of a detriment to it but I do think it's become so commonplace that you would expect it from a multiplayer game take for example Concord God Rest its soul

in it's already in the grave in less than two weeks that was a $40 game that should have been free to play cuz all the competitors are however in this case I don't know exactly what paint Warfare competes with would it have been better financially for banan Dev to keep a price tag on it I don't know but probably not I feel like the long-term benefits of having having a game with 750,000 downloads outweigh the shortterm gains of having more money come in from people curiously purchasing it and maybe not engaging with it I think

building that Community is better longterm for his upcoming projects as opposed to you know maybe made a few extra thousand doar by keeping a price tag over it on it over the course of those years but working on paint Warfare despite not making a lot of money has given me a crap ton of knowledge on what to do and what not to do when publishing games and it's opened so many doors with a large game like this under my belt I can land pretty much any freelancing gig I want due to my experience and efficiency

of Dev I've also had the opportunity to work for YouTubers like black Thor fraud making a course for him and I also got the privilege of taking part in some really cool challenges on YouTube due to my track record so there definitely are a lot of indirect benefits it seems banana Dev would agree as well like I said he has a good perspective on all of it this is an incredible achievement to have a game with 750,000 downloads also it seems most people really like the game so that's huge the assets code base and experience

on how to do stuff faster and how to and how to not Markus can be taken into future projects and I'm really hoping for the next game I work on it'll be a lot more financially successful so I can make this into a career he then goes on to say that the advice you would give to someone that's aspiring to do game development is to not make a free-to-play game because they're very hard to monetize he then goes into a deeper in-depth breakdown on like the demographics of the game like who is downloading it where

as well as like what location was spending the most and what was spending you know this portion of the revenue versus that it's all very insightful so I highly recommend checking out his full video on it I just wanted to talk about this a little bit because it's a very rare Peak behind the curtain of what game development looks like outside of like a major Studio this is a solo developer tackling a big project over the course of years and thousands of hours of work and what does that look like in terms of money and

it's not a lot at least not in this case and I imagine this is the story for a lot of game developers out there that are putting their heart and soul into their work publishing it on Steam and seeing if they can turn that passion into a career it is is really difficult and this only showed just how hard it is even if you find a lot of success with downloads that doesn't necessarily translate to a lot of success financially and game development is a labor intensive expensive endeav that takes a long time so you

do need to be making money off of it otherwise it's not sustainable you can't keep doing it which I think everyone fully understands 42 cents an hour for for that work that is not viable for most people in the world for good reason you can't live off that and I really appreciate this video from banana Dev here CU it's a super open and honest look at what game development looks like even with a successful title under your belt monetizing it is not an easy task and I personally just would have never guessed it would look

like this on the back end I always just assume the most important thing to the financial success of a product like on Steam is how many downloads it had but there's definitely a lot more to it that I now recognize thanks to that video so again I highly recommend you check out Banana dev's full video on it for a more in-depth breakdown but I just wanted to talk about it a little bit cuz I found it super interesting that's really about it see you