Game Dev

$560,000 in Steam sales... but how much do you actually KEEP?

Do you know how much money you keep from your Steam revenue? If you've never published a game you might not be familiar with the math, which is important to know so you can figure out how many sales you need to break even. You might know about Steam's 30% cut, and hopefully you know about taxes, but do you know the 3 or 4 other potential cuts?

One developer wrote about their experience here explaining how $560,000 in gross revenue across two games became roughly $73,000 in personal take-home income over five years. That is quite a difference! If you're not ready for it it can be pretty hard to stomach.

Personally, this doesn't surprise me, but that's just because I've been releasing Steam games for over a decade, so I know how different the big dashboard number is from what actually reaches your pocket. If I were just starting out I would definitely want to know this information.

According to his breakdown, around $134,000 went to refunds (5-20% is the normal range), $127,000 to Steam (their 30% AFTER refunds, chargebacks and taxes like VAT), and $115,000 to a regional publisher, followed by US tax-withholding (which is very painful if your country does not have a treaty with the US), and local taxes. Those deductions add up quickly!

However, there is also important context behind that scary headline. The amount remaining was approximately $146,000, split equally between two co-founders. That other half didn't disappear, it went to the other developer who helped make the games.

And the publisher's share isn't automatically wasted money either. The developer says their marketing was valuable and believes they may have doubled sales or more. When it comes to publishers the question is whether you earn MORE with their help, even after their cut, and in this example that seems to be the case.

But the most important thing is how at the end of the day the developer did say how $15,000 per year (which was the total after all this math) is enough for him to live a good life in his country. That is what I've often said is the closest thing to a super-power for game devs, low cost of living. It's definitley part of the reason why I was a successful dev, I didn't need $10,000 per month like a dev working in San Francisco, here in Portugal I was more than okay with $2000 per month.

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Game Dev

Unity 7 CoreCLR is FINALLY here! (in Alpha)

Unity 7.0 Alpha is now available, including the very first CoreCLR-powered Editor without Mono! After years of waiting, it is awesome to see something this important becoming something we can actually test.

This is the future of Unity's C# layer. CoreCLR brings so many awesome benefits like I covered in this video. It brings a more modern runtime, better memory management with less fragmentation, and the foundations for faster code execution. It also makes it easier for Unity to benefit from ongoing improvements in .NET rather than maintaining its aging Mono implementation. That is really exciting!

However, the full upgrade is NOT here yet. This initial alpha still uses C# 9 and the .NET Standard 2.1 APIs. Unity is working towards C# 14 and .NET 10, but there is no confirmed public date for those capabilities yet. The runtime change and the newer language features are separate steps.

Also, don't expect opening your project to suddenly make everything twice as fast. Unity is explicitly prioritizing compatibility, stability, and performance parity for 7.0, with further performance improvements targeted at the following Unity 7 LTS. So this is about getting the foundations working first.

So while the full benefits are not quite here yet, they are coming! Unity 7 is shaping up to be a really exciting release.

Fun

Robot Decomissioned like T2!

I love robotics and love how the industry seems to be getting constant improvements in the past few years. All of a sudden we have humanoid robots doing insanely impressive tasks that seemed impossible just 5 years ago.

But robots have a shelf life, especially since the industry is moving so quickly, you get to a point where it's better to create a new one from scratch instead of continuing to update it.

And when that happens? What do you do? Well if you're Figure you make your old robot toss itself into lava!

That's a super cool video! Perfect Terminator 2 reference!