Guide for an indie developer:How to get money from your Steam game

v 1.0 10.01.2022
Profit or prospect, what should matter the most for an indie developer who makes PC games?

Profit or prospect, what should matter the most for an indie developer who makes PC games?

Most PC/console games’ business model is based on a one-time game purchase, and the main goal of marketers is to create a pretty cover for a game, in a form that players would want to buy.

On presentations of big games, companies use big words, showing their juicy promo content, and they promise that it will be a truly unique gaming experience that won’t compare to anything else. An encouraged player launches a game and doesn’t see things that studio’s founder was praising.

A similar situation is happening on a mobile game market and I’ll show you a prime example as a meme of marketers:

Your first sales depend on how you prepare your game’s marketing, which constitute a big part of the total income for any game.

The better the game – the smaller is a share of the first week sales. For a game that intentionally deceives user’s expectations, a share of the first week can be up to 60% of the total game sales.

Starting from the stage of planning the budget, each time you will be faced with a choice: make it better or save money? Every time when you choose “make it better” – you will increase the development costs and allegedly lose money. But working on details might increase player loyalty to the product, affect their reviews and as a consequence – affect your sales.

A loyal player will stay with you longer, they bought a DLC and will add your new game to their wishlist, whereas a disappointed player will be gone forever, at best without writing a negative review on Steam.

As a project manager, your goal is to find such balance of product’s quality that the development cost would be minimal and users would like the game.

If you plan to release a second game, it’s normal that your first game wouldn’t make money, but players would like it. It’s most important to attract a loyal audience for a game that will share your product with other players and follow new releases.

Profit or prospect, what should matter the most for an indie developer who makes PC games?
GameSensor Man

On the topic

To date, a model of free online games with in-game purchases is more effective than just product sales, but this approach can be afforded only by big game studios.