Stardew Valley is in the top 5 selling indie games of all time, with 50 million units sold. It's owned and run entirely by one person (the donor in OP's link) - he ended his relationship with a (small) games publisher a few years ago, and runs everything himself.
“In Feb. 2024, Stardew Valley reached 30 million copies sold, and if we assume each copy sold for $15, that means that the game could have generated a revenue of $450 million. A modest 10 percent profit margin puts ConcernedApe’s earnings at $45 million, a number that is likely to increase in the future.” Source: https://dotesports.com/stardew-valley/news/how-much-money-di...
TBH the profit margin on this game is probably closer to 100% than 10%, it was a solo-dev game so never much overhead, I think one guy was hired to work on it.
30% off the top for most stores (Valve/Steam, Apple/iPhone, Google/Android, etc), then around 50% taxes between state, local... some fixed expenses and overhead. It's probably well under 20% in the bank after all is said and done. That said, it's still a lot of money.
The highest marginal combined tax rate in the U.S. is 51.8% (37+10.9+3.9, assuming an NYC address).
However, this is business income, not compensation, so it's taxed on a net basis, not a gross basis (even though it may still be included on his personal income tax return). This means his taxable income is the amount left after taking into account the retailer's fees, subcontractor costs, etc.
So, for example, if he made $100 selling games, $30 would go to the store. Assuming no expenses and overhead (since we have no data to come up with those numbers), the remaining $70 would be subject to tax. Assuming he lived in NYC, he would pay up to $36.26 in combined taxes (not taking into account the SALT deduction or the progressive tax rate calculation), for a post-tax net of at least $33.74. Assuming he lived in WA as other commenters note, he would pay up to $25.9 in federal taxes, for a post-tax net of no less than $44.1. (But note: Washington has an excise tax on businesses which is based on gross income...)
Stardew likely qualifies for the reduced store cuts. Steam _lowers_ the percentage for a game when it sells high. Still somewhere between 10 and 25%, though.
Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
This, however, is one area where eventually Epic Games shines — they take a much lower cut and if they increase in popularity with gamers then steam might be forced to lower their share.
This is basically almost public information: 25% cut on earnings between $10 million and $50 million.
Yet most likely very big share of sales is well below $10 let alone $15 due to sales and regional pricing.
So yeah I doubt numbers anywhere close to those adverised.
> Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
Steam no longer provide any discoverability on its own unless you either bring your own community ftom outside or spend $10,000-100,000 on marketing to gain wishlists.
If you're small 2-10 people indie gamedev studio and have external funding Valve will earn more from your game than you.
In this case, as a solo dev, it's probably quite justified to be honest. I doubt ConcernedApe would have really been able to continue solo-ing it with this level of success if he also had to maintain distribution channels, sales/returns, marketing, legal stuff on a global scale.
It's probably the big name studios who already have entire departments to do that kind of stuff that feel they're being ripped off.
Actually the more you earn the worse the deal is - he's probably paid about $100 million for what amounts to $100,000s of labor if he paid people to take care of this stuff, and some (low) millions in taxes collected for various jurisdictions. Dude's personally bought Gabe a ship in exchange for some accounting.
When you're talking millions in income it can be that high depending on your state... IIRC, as peer comment mentions, Washington doesn't have state taxes, you still have a nominal rate for Federal at 38% though, and I'm not sure about sales, property or other taxes, which again, likely approach or exceed 50% against total income.
Just checked, seems it's now 37% for the top federal bracket... for what it's worth, I think it's amoral to tax more than half of what someone makes, regardless of how much they make.
Came here to recommend this book. It is fantastic. There are nine other games covered besides Stardew Valley. Some are great, some not so great, but the stories behind each one are excellent.
Not really, what they actually do for most games is basically what Google and Apple do: a token review, then nothing apart from some niceties for players. Then they pocket an immense profit, it came out in one of Epic's cases that Valve net $50 million/year profit per employee.
The only thing for developers they still do better than Google and Apple really is a few promotions throughout the year that target specific genres for released games developers can register for (whereas Google and Apple select the games they promote), and the "Next Fest" 3x a year for unreleased games.
They used to do stuff like "visibility rounds" that would reach 100,000s of people who didn't know about your game - the same feature today targets people who already wishlisted your game, so these days most developers have to put significant effort and money into promoting their Steam page on other channels like tiktok/youtube/reddit.
Well, plus there's the whole version management and packaging and hosting and distributing giant amounts of data.
If you are an indie team that makes a 50GB game and has 50k players, distributing and update management would be a gargantuan task without Steam or something like it. 2.5 petabytes of bandwidth isn't cheap.
Yes what they do is profitable, I'm not saying that it isn't. But paying for what they do is (clearly) still more attractive to developers than rolling their own infrastructure to do the same.
That firehose isn't pointed at everyone, being the newest game on Steam has a very fleeting value and then it's on you to find customers. It used to be that Steam played a much more active role in spreading traffic around games but these days the median game is doing $1,000 - $2,000 in sales which is like 100 - 200 copies sold. It's more and more like Google and Apple where what you get out of it is just a function of how much you spend on customer acquisition, how well you reach social media, and whether you can leverage these to become popular enough to achieve prominence.
Everyone launches on Steam because they are an utterly-entrenched monopoly, all other PC game distribution channels are collectively a very small percent.
The firehose only ever pointed at "everyone" back when Valve was hand-picking every game that got released on Steam. Back then we only saw a few games released every week, and because of that they got that much more attention. But that also meant that most games never got any attention on Steam, since they were never released there.
However, Valve has since removed most barriers to entry and these days Steam sees more than 350 releases every week (nearly 20k in 2025), a number that is constantly growing. Add to the fact that there are already more than 130,000 games on Steam, that every new release has to compete with, and it is no wonder that median sales are low:
The low barrier to entry means that a lot of crappy games being released on Steam, that were never going to sell a lot, and the actually good games have to compete with all the other good games on the platform, that are probably also being sold at a much greater discount than your newly released title
Right, all the games that they think will be successful. Most games won't- it's a power law market.
There's nothing preventing a game dev from selling exclusively on their own site. It's not as though Steam has exclusive access to Windows customers like the App/Play Store do on their platforms. Steam earns its customers and their trust and developers follow.
And the decision to risk years of his life spent on a project that might not pan out. IIRC he was largely supported by his girlfriend during development and he worked in a cinema. That's in contrast to a job at a studio where you get a salary for your time whether it succeeds or not.
Of the purchase price that the end-user pays, the retailer has to pay tax. That knocks off a variable percentage. It would be 20% in the UK.
There's also the cost of selling through Steam / Google Play / Whatever - typically 30%.
I assume the developer has some professional expenses - an accountant at a minimum, probably a lawyer, certainly insurance. Maybe they also have a PR team, advertising, and the like. I don't know whether they pay for testers, translators, and things like that.
Then we get on to things like buying a new development machine, going to tech conferences, taking an educational course, backups, and all the other things that a business needs to spend on in order to be effective.
Maybe a profit margin of 10% is unrealistically low - but developing software has legitimate costs. The margin is never going to be 100%.
What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is? They make cents on every can. Something like 2-3%.
The video games industry is filled to the brim with gatekeepers who take their cuts. Valve takes 30%, just for their store. Publishers start at 10%. Your engine might take a cut.
Estimating that Stardew Valley, the big success video game with the lowest overhead bar none, has made 10% profit might be too low. 20%? Might be high.
He used this open source engine, it is free. He is almost certainly getting between 60-70% of revenue after distribution fees. His only other expenses are taxes and the other devs he employs and he was solo until the game made like $100 million. Most of the copies sold for $15 so it seems fair to me to say his companies lifetime revenue is close to $10*number of units sold which is close to half a billion dollars. And since the companies expenses are effectively zero profit is the same. If he’s smart with taxes he’s paid 15% corporate tax rate then 15% capital gains rate which comes out to just under 28% so his own lifetime earnings is probably around $360 million.
> What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is?
For whom? The manufacture? It's closer to 10-30% for the manufacture (lower for white label goods, higher for "premium" brands). And it's higher for products that enjoy monopoly status.
For retailers, it's 2-3%, but retailers also get products on loan and negotiate various agreements that help cover the costs of displays, shipping, marketing, and wastage. So even that small percentage margin is skewed a bit.
There's a reason that retailers and food manufactures ("canned goods") were some of the largest American companies prior to technology taking off. It's a highly profitable industry.
> What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is?
Um, exactly the sort of numbers that you're providing. I'm baffled by the question or what possible relevance you thought it had here.
> 10% profit might be too low. 20%? Might be high.
You think an indie game like the one in question is making less on each copy sold than Valve is making on it? That's nuts. If the creator isn't clearing 50% on each marginal unit sold, then something is seriously wrong.
Besides tax and the store's cut, the games also regularly sales and prices-changes. So you can't just extrapolate the price today with the amount of units sold and assume this to be the revenue.
This doesn't seem high to me at all. You buy the game, try it for an hour, feel kind of meh on it or even just see a different game you think you'd like even more, and hit the refund button. If anything, I'm surprised it's only ~12%.
Is it incredibly rare? We've seen time and time again in the last few years, really basic indie games overtake AAA games in sales on Steam. Schedule One is another one which had 450 thousand concurrent players not very long after its launch. It seems AAA game studios are missing what gamers want at every turn. There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.
Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O.
More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
Those games are a grain of sand in the infinite desert that is the indie game world. The vast majority of indie games on Steam are barely even noticed by anyone.
Schedule One sold more copies than a brand new Assassins Creed game at launch on Steam, Minecraft has sold more copies than most AAA games, including GTA 5.
Yeah, sometimes I look back and think: Why didn’t they just choose to build a genre defining game? Next you’ll tell me that instead of just buying Bitcoin at $1k they chose to make yet another game.
I'm not claiming it's every indie game I'm saying its not quite as rare as you suggest, I look at new releases on Steam all the time, there's less indie games than you think being released. More than there probably should be, but its not like tens of thousands a day or week or even in a month. Its about 800 a month. That's rare if anything, not "incredibly rare"
And out of the 800 new indie games a month, how many are breakout successes and sell even 10k copies? That's what is rare, not that indie games are rare, but having a success (like winning the lottery) is relatively rare.
At 10k new indie games a year, maybe a dozen gross over a million. A larger studio can't afford those kind of odds. That said, they should be able to make more games with a better focus on gameplay and a bit less on leading tech graphics.
This. And honestly, 10k sales is the bare minimum. Even if you’re a solo dev with no team and you handle everything yourself (programming, sound, music, art, marketing) to keep costs down, you’re still looking at around 6–12 months of work.
Most indie games don’t sell for more than $10 USD, but let’s be generous and say you manage to convince your audience to pay $20.
Total: 200,000 USD
After Steam Cut: 140,000 USD
And now you need to get lightning to strike every year to maintain your annual income so you can retire before you're Methuselah.
Could you work on the game part-time while holding down a full-time job? Sure, but you've got to have some iron stamina to want to sit in front of a computer for another 4 hours after a full day of work. Furthermore, not being able to focus on the game means dev might take significantly longer.
I was thinking 10K copies as a metric for even modest "success" for a game, but you're right about the expenses and income... That said, depending on where you live, that's a pretty good income.
Indie games (which is just a tag you can add to your game) notwithstanding - the number of games released per month appears to be closer to double that.
There are thousands of new games each year. The handful lucky outstanding low-budget games won't put anyone to shame.
> There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.
Don't confuse indie with AAA. Indie is about control, AAA about budget. There is usually a correlation between control and budget, but there are also many long-running indie-devs with good budget now. Supergiant, who made Hades 2 for example, are such an AA(A)-Indie.
> Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O.
> More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
Those are long-running, genre-defining games, which also received a good budget over the years. Many of them are in the realm of AA, probably AAA now. Those are naturally grown services-games which could grow from success to become even more successful. Big studies tried to emulate this in the last years, but ultimately failed big in most cases.
The general problem is, the bigger your budget, the bigger the anxiety, leading to more control, conservative micromanaging and throwing every shit into the game to cater as much people as possible, which in high numbers cannibalizes the market eventually. Low-budgets can take on more risks, focus on their gaming-mechanisms and don't have to sell big. Making small money to cover your costs is already good enough, and they all can always explode by luck if they get their marketing right.
Games like Schedule 1 or R.E.P.O. don't have to offer 100h+ of fancy fun and high level entertainment. People are happy if they can get their 10+ hours of fun out of it, because they didn't waste big money on it anyway. So you will always see cheap games occasionally explode for a short while, while everyone is waiting for the big games going on sale, especially when the cheap games are coming with a social aspect.
> It seems AAA game studios are missing what gamers want at every turn.
I’m really not sure what it is. Usually, when a company begins to abandon/shaft their user base like that, it’s because they found a more lucrative market to chase instead.
The Stardew guy spent five years not working, living off of the labor of his girlfriend.
Sure, take your shot, but it is unreasonable to think that many people have the opportunity to drop everything for a five year vision quest, hoping to come out the other side a financial success.
A winning lottery ticket would have an even better return on investment. Good luck with that business strategy.
(To be clear, Stardew Valley is a great game. But "making a breakout indie game" really does feel akin to winning the lottery to me, even if the game is fundamentally great.)
Your chances are much more higher building your own game than playing the lottery endlessly. You forget that guy who made Stardew Valley had to self-teach everything he knew, till he got to the point he quit his full time job. I don't see in what universe you have a better chance to win the lottery, than to build a successful indie game if you truly put your heart into it. Some of the greatest inventions didn't come to us because someone won the lottery, they experimented and kept going. Look at Duck Duck Go, he had 30 other projects that 'failed' before Duck Duck Go succeeded.
The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
If you want to create indie games—and you can make it work without quitting your day job—go for it! But I don't think it would be smart for EA or Ubisoft to, like, stop making big-budget games and make indie games instead. If you can make a breakout hit, you can make a huge profit—but you have to make a breakout hit, and that comes down to a lot of luck.
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Now, I do think it would make sense for EA/Ubisoft to try more mid-budget releases, which explore something new instead of continuing a 10+ year franchise. A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the publishers were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped? Although caveat, I also haven't been following gaming as closely as I once did.
> A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the studios were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped?
I think the problem comes from marketing budgets. For any given game a marketing budget can push some amount of sales, but applying a marketing budget to each game makes it much harder for the winners to make up losses on the rest.
Small releases also need to be 'lean' releases; management overhead is another cost that's hard to make up in scale.
Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
Hearthstone (Blizzard) is another rare exception of an indie-scale, in-house game that was a breakout hit that could not have come from the outside (because of the IP involved), but even that existed because it started as a "closet-scale" project with senior developers who insulated themselves from management pressures.
That's interesting, I think you're probably right.
> Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
The advantage would be funding. I love indie games but I do get tired of 2D pixel art. With just a bit more money—still an order of magnitude less than Call of Duty, mind you—the possibilities really expand.
I started playing Psychonauts 2 this week, and I think it's such an incredible game—and a great example of what can happen when an "indie" developer manages to secure a real budget. (I don't know if Double Fine is indie, but their games contain the sort of outside-the-box thinking I associate with indies.)
Perhaps some sort of YCombinator-esque model could actually work here.
> The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
Absolutely. People tend to assume that 95% of video games turn a profit, when it's the reverse. There are highly polished, incredibly high quality video games who simply just don't sell.
Half a billion USD (40M+ units sold), so 125K USD to have the core engine of your product be actively maintained by an expert for the price of +/- one developer is a very good deal
Stardew valley was apparently solo developed, and if Google is accurate it has sold over 40 million copies. Even if he sold it for a dollar, the dev would be very successful by most standards.
I don't know if those coordinates are correct. They seem to be the exact coordinates of Jiayuguan City [0], but then the article also says that the 404 site is located "100 km west of Jiayuguan City," with living areas later relocated to Jiayuguan. So I think the article authors just put the Jiayuguan coords there.
> Once an event crosses a threshold (maybe 70%?) of male-or-female dominance, most people of the other gender are likely to decline (or just not-come to your next party) as a result.
I don't know. Probably depends on your demographic. I already have a partner, so if I feel like I won't connect with the crowd I'm probably gonna decline.
And yes, I get it. If it gets to a poitn where it feels more like a female-only space, I'll be less inclined to go next time. I don't want to feel like I'm invading.
I'm perfectly fine with a sausage fest, though. That's the default in tech circles, after all.
Imo it's not just about being functional so I can get work done. It's also about enjoying what I'm doing and having aesthetic tools is important to me. It's still functionality the most important? Yes. Do I prefer non-ugly tools to ugly tools even if I had to trade a bit of functionality for a lot of prettiness? Yes, every single time (as long as I can still get done what I need to get done, ofc)
After being in multiple orgs and having been in touch with c-suite, I have suspicions that lack of total empathy and psychopathic tendencies are a must to get to really high social-based positions.
They are practically a must just to get there... to thrive in this 'layer' of society, a person is quite far away from regular average human in various worst ways possible
I know headhunters that specialize in identifying highly functioning sociopaths for leadership roles. But experiencing total dehumanization of others first-hand and subsequent rise of that person is something one never forgets.
