Median indie game on Steam makes $341.

[Nathaniel3W]

Someone compiled a bunch of data and put it in this handy Google doc along with his list of assumptions.

Fun and/or sad discoveries: Top 1% make 63% of the money. Top 10% make 95% of the money. Median game makes $341, not accounting for a bunch of stuff. Actual take-home pay is probably about 20-40% less than what's listed.

 

[coyotecraft]

This just covers the first 30 days. The lower half of the list that's all 0s is mostly Soundtracks, DLC, Guides.
I'm sure there are older games that are just now being made available on Steam for the first time.

Just checking out the a few games at the bottom is just - ugh.
Bad font choices. Auto-Translated English games. Inappropriate genre labels -they're all "Action" "Adventure" instead of "Platformer". A lot of casual games I can't imagine anyone would pay for.

 

[bacon]

The steam indie market is extremely saturated with games

 

[buguraz]

Mean revenue for an indie game in 2017 is $25,000. Median is $341. Steam is power curve. Most of us are median.

 

[ZenVirZan]

You have to remember as well that a lot of the games listed there will be the shovelware trash that my boy Jim Sterling covers. There is an unbelievable amount of copy-pasted tutorial content uploaded to Steam each week.

 

[Heretic86]

Ever heard of the 80 / 20 rule?

- 20% of people make 80% of the money
- 20% of the words in our native languages that we know are used 80% of the time (if, and, but, the, etc)
- 20% of the people cause 80% of the problems
- 20% of the code causes 80% of the glitches

Im sure the same thing applies to indy games too...

 

[Ellie]

To me it's always seemed like there are a few big hits that make a ton of money, and there are also big bits that make nothing and weren't trying to make anything. Those all skew any averages. There are also an awful lot of rubbish games out there frankly. I don't think it's true that if you put a game out there you can expect to make $341. Look at how good your game is, how good your marketing is, where it's aimed and indeed what you intended to get in the first place, and I reckon you're likely to hit higher than that. How much higher? Probably not enough to live off, but decent to supplement an income. But if you throw out shit you'll get shit back. If everybody's My First Game made millions we'd be in a sorry situation, but plenty of people do release Their First Game on commercial marketplaces hoping to do just that.

 

[hozaqa]

This is interesting, but the data is wildly inaccurate. Many zero or low selling items (at least on the 2017 list) appear to be tiny or free DLCs, soundtracks and similar goods rather than games. It's only a 2-month sample (most of the actual games listed have had sales outside that timeframe) and the change in owners appears to be based on steamspy stats, which can be off by as much as +-50% according to steamspy itself.