Hi, I'm hakairyuousinn (my X account).
My goal is to earn ¥10,000,000 a year from games, after stores and advertising sites take their share.
How many plays or sales would that take? Before setting my own targets, I looked at figures from people who've done it. I collected only reports published by the developers themselves.
Browser games: about €557 from 450,000 plays
DonislawDev published results for eight games. On CrazyGames, a browser game site, the total was 451,327 plays and €556.92. About €1.2 per 1,000 plays.
These are old figures from one developer, published in 2020. Today's rates are likely different.
Steam: subtracting 30% isn't the end of it
The same developer's Yerba Mate Tycoon sold 907 copies in about four months, bringing in $1,723. About $1.9 per copy, on a list price of $4–5.
Taxes, refunds and Steam's 30% share come off, and regional pricing and discounts matter too. Steam's own explanation says the revenue share is applied after refunds and taxes are deducted. The dashboard's “net,” meaning sales minus refunds and taxes, isn't all the developer's money.
Money paid out isn't all yours either
Pawnbarian sold over 8,400 copies in 2.5 months after release. Payouts after Steam and other stores took their share exceeded $45,000. After the composer's share and taxes, the developer said roughly $30,000 or more remained.
It took about 20 months to make.
The same game earns differently on different stores
Mixolumia is sold on both itch.io and Steam.
| Store | Copies sold | Revenue | Payout |
|---|---|---|---|
| itch.io | 1,776 | $17,906 | $14,980 |
| Steam | 713 | $6,202 | $3,680 |
From the developer's June 2021 retrospective. The release dates differ: August 2020 on itch.io and November that year on Steam. That prevents a direct comparison. Even so, the share deducted between revenue and payout differs quite a bit by store.
A big hit: about half the net amount remained
SNKRX sold 116,694 copies on Steam, with revenue of $338,330. The developer wrote that what finally remained was about half the dashboard's net figure.
The hardest part of reading these reports was that “revenue,” “net,” “payout” and “take-home” meant different things in each one. Before comparing them, I had to check what had already been deducted every time.
These are also only figures from people who chose to publish them. People who did well are more likely to share, so I can't treat these as typical earnings.