Two Steam games earned $560,000 over five years, but the co-creator says he and his partner took home just about $15,000 a year before taxes and other costs.
Two Steam games earned $560,000 over five years, but the creators say they only took home about $15,000 a year. That gap comes from Steam’s fees, taxes, refunds, and a publisher cut that covers marketing in Asia.
Why it matters: for small studios, the path from sales to pay can be long and winding, with many costs and regional deals eating into earnings.
What happens next: indie teams may push for fairer revenue splits or explore alternative publishing avenues to keep more of their profits.
Two Steam games generated $560,000 in revenue across 135,000 sales, but the people who made them say their actual take-home was far smaller. The co-founder of Northend Games explains the breakdown, noting that refunds, platform fees, taxes, and publisher cuts eat much of the money that a tiny studio would expect to see left for the developers themselves.
In this indie tale, the $560,000 gross comes from sales of Northend Tower Defense and Deepstone Rift (Early Access) on Steam. About half of those sales came from China, and the creator says the country’s refund rate is unusually high, contributing to a large portion of refunds that reduce final earnings.
Steam charges a base fee around 30% for most developers, with discounts on higher volumes. For Northend Games, the numbers implied that the platform kept substantial funds, and the developer suggests the split left about $127,000 for Steam’s cut and roughly $297,000 for the developers, though the exact agency of the publisher’s share isn’t fully disclosed due to an NDA. U.S. taxes reduce the total further, with a credit that drops the net after withholding to roughly $287,300 before the publisher’s region-specific cuts.
The publisher’s cut, which covers PR, distribution, and marketing in Asia, was described as a sliding-scale charge. Given that the majority of sales were in China, the co-creator estimates the publisher’s share could be around 35–40% of net income, a figure that would significantly lower the final take-home. Thailand-based offices taking a slice also reduces what the developers pocket, but even with this, the net result remains modest for a five-year effort. After sharing the earnings 50/50 with his co-founder, the personal take-home amounts to roughly $73,000 for five years, or about $15,000 per year.
Put plainly, the numbers challenge a common belief that successful indie games translate into big paydays for the people who actually built them. The co-founder notes that even modest revenue can look tempting on a chart, but the real money rarely lands with the creators when all the middleware, regional deals, and taxes are accounted for.
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