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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what kind of margins do you get when you sell a game on Steam? Like, what percentage of a sale ends up in your bank account (pre-taxes). Also, how do Steam sales affect that?

Congrats on making a game to completion, and doubly so for making something that gets fairly popular. Making a real game has been on my bucket list for about as long as I've known how to program, and I haven't completely given up on it, but I would need to make friends with someone who knows how to do art and music.

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Between returns, taxes, and other stuff, I think you can model at ~55% of gross Steam sales. Then, whatever your split w/ your publisher is, on top of that. So I think it's easy for ppl to severely overestimate how much a dev is actually earning by just multiplying units times price :)

I think in general the uptick of sales volume more than offsets the discount during a Steam sale. There's a reason Steam sales have a cooldown, they generate marketing emails to your wishlists. So sales are always good, from what I can tell.

Thanks for the congrats, and all I can say is: don't give up, I'm an old-ass man and made it happen. Don't get stuck on art or music either, IMHO. Total distraction. You can make a game fun without that stuff. At least, fun enough to be sure the investment into the next stage is wise.

What factors made you choose to go with a publisher vs. self-publish?

One major benefit of publishers is a salary while the game is being developed. The other major benefit is marketing, the linked Steam page is titled:

> 200K Ballionaires!

> Where do you all keep coming from?!

A good portion of those came from the publisher's efforts.

Related to this: is there any kind of contractual language that keeps Steam creators from saying how much money they made on the platform? Please note that I'm not asking how much you made on this game, that's none of my business! Just wondering if there's an NDA or something like that. I've been curious about it for a while.

I don't think there is such a legal obligation, because videos like this one exist where devs do share the exact financials of their Steam releases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPMfcaUulYU

Steam dont do anything like that, but 99% of contracts with game publishes will include NDA on financial information.

Steam takes 30% and the publisher ( https://rawfury.com/developer-resources/ ) takes 50%, so the dev should end up with 35% of revenue (which then needs to be taxed etc.).

Maybe a dumb question but... in the age of Steam, what does the publisher do these days? Advance funding? What do those numbers look like?

Most of the marketing will come from the publisher. It's easy for a game not to be noticed, and to crater thanks to no audience. The publisher runs the early and mid ad campaigns.

Depends on the deal. Promotion and fronting of cash are the big ones (usually). They can usually also offer various development services (testing, translation, porting, getting special deals with platform holders). They can also act as a stakeholder for quality, advising on certain things that should be improved (as an editor would in book publishing).

Really depends on the deal, but porting, marketing, localization and cash advances are common ones (Porting for the switch for example is known to be a big one, even for experienced solo/indie devs)

Who is the publisher? Isn’t it steam or the author itself?

If you look on the Steam page it's Raw Fury.

Steam is just the storefront. A game publisher's role varies a lot - sometimes they're just financing the project, usually they handle stuff like PR and marketing, and sometimes they help quite a bit more with the development of the game (sounds like the case in this case based on his other answers) as in programming/art/sfx/whatever else.

You're right, but unfortunately you forgot that:

1 - Before Steam take it's cut there are taxes and refunds, 15-20% depend on geography of sales.

2 - Publisher need to recouperate spendings agreed in contract, but yeah then it's likely between 40 and 60%.

For 1., I had the taxes afterwards and since every factor is just multiplied, it doesn’t matter for the end result. And do refunds count into the final sales number?

For 2., I linked the page where you can find the document where the publisher claims to take 50%, if I didn’t miss something while skimming it.

Unfortunately when selling games on Steam you pay taxes twice. First of all Steam pay VAT all around the world. It's not included in their 30% cut. And then you pay corporate tax from your net profit after Steam or publisher sent royalties your way.

Refunds on Steam can happen after a while so it's important to keep them in mind. If you sold 100 copies of your game 5-10% will be refunded.

> I linked the page where you can find the document where the publisher claims to take 50%.

I havent worked with Raw Fury and wouldn't be able to talk about it then anyway, but:

1 - If a publisher funded your game they will recuperate expenses by taking 70-100% of net profit. After that it can be 50%

2 - Some publishers also include localization, QA, LQA and even marketing budget into recoup amount.

Game Maker’s Toolkit did a breakdown of publishing a game on steam for a general view of the expenses.

Starting around 6:35

https://youtu.be/5ycSvC0ZM0k?si=DM1V06BZ1Zxbqrzh

Generic steam fee is 30%

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