I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve heard a rough proxy for modest success “above breakeven” in the indie sphere is 1,000+ reviews.
The chart doesn’t break out the 1,000+ review count band, but it looks like under 5% of the 19,000 games released in 2025 on Steam were even able to go above 500 review count.
The 1,000+ review count band as a measure of success does make sense in a back of the napkin kind of way.
Assuming 5% of buyers leave a review, that would be 20,000 in sales. At a net unit revenue of $10 (after Steam’s cut and the payment processor), that would be $200 K net revenue.
An unfortunate ‘secret’ for most indie titles is that the vast majority of their sales are on discount, usually during launch or one of the big week long sales. Not a lot of people buy indie games at full sticker price unless its a pretty high quality title.
So your $200K net revenue would be at absolute max, but is realistically ~50-80% of that.
Assuming 5% of buyers leave a review, that would be 20,000 in sales. At a net unit revenue of $10 (after Steam’s cut and the payment processor), that would be $200 K net revenue.
A unit revenue of $10 means your product is going for ~15 base price. I don’t know about you, but I rarely buy stuff above $10 anymore. So like the other guy said, you’re looking at like half of that based on people buying during sales.
I have bazzite on my daughter’s machine. I still had to enable compatibility for other titles. It’s not a huge deal if you know it’s there, but it can be a stumbling block for someone testing the waters.
Just wanted to add to this for those who don’t know, windows games work through a comparability later called Proton, it usually works great, but some games don’t work well with it. (Mostly anticheat and stuff like that causing issues IIRC) I would always recommend checking ProtonDB before purchasing any game without explicit Linux support
FYI - the owner of this site, gamingonlinux, was a mod on the !linux_gaming community until they were caught abusing their moderator powers. Then they deleted their account and complained on mastodon that it’s stupid design that mod logs are public. [Screenshot]
My biggest complaint about Sims-likes is that the visual style always looks too serious. It gives me the feeling that whatever I’m going to do with my not-Sims, it’s gonna be something that makes me regret my real life.
You wanna know what I did the last time I played the Sims 2 though? I repeatedly held parties at my Sim’s house and then lured the guests into a room they couldn’t get out of. I also used the moveobjects cheat to collect police cars whenever a cop showed up to shut the party down. By the time I was done I had amassed around 70 urns, many hysterical immortal Sims (Sims with households can’t die while visiting someone’s house in the Sims 2), 4 Police cars and a fire truck.
The Sims has a mischievous air to it that tickles the devil on your shoulder and begs you to listen to them. None of the Sims-likes I’m aware of seem to have the same air.
Not by our own accord. Unity is the seemingly cool, weed-sharing guy with shady friends who wanted to introduce you at a party one day and decided to grope your boob to tell Musk how laid back you were and they both laughed.
can’t help but feel like this could be solved by increasing the deposit to a couple thosuand $'s or something. worst of the shovelware would become unprofitable immediately
Well, that’d mean missing out on some really cool stuff.
Games like Vampire Survivors and Stardew Valley were made by a solo developer. A couple thousand bucks is a LOT of money for some people. I’d hate to have missed out on either of those.
We certainly do need some quality control, but I don’t think the financial route is the way to go.
What is there to be solved? It’s not a physical store with scant storage space. It has been solved by the store algorithm. Games that do well in the first week will rise to the front page and will get recommended to other customers, while crap will basically become invisible. Does it really matter that these crap games exist when you’ll rarely see them and the storage space they take up is insignificant to Valve’s bottom line. Like when was the last time you ever saw shovelware on the front page? If you see shovelware then the algorithm thinks you like that stuff. You can solve that by giving shovel ware in your library low reviews and by curating the queue.
Sure this will hurt some devs who made a hidden gem, but these devs would have failed in the physical retail space as well. Studios have the responsibility to do the leg work of promoting their own game. That’s not Steam’s job. The Steam algorithm will basically give each game some visibility during its first few days of release and if a game can’t generate sales momentum the algorithm will drop it and basically becomes invisible unless you search for it. Games that do well in that period get pushed to the recommendations. And no the threshold isn’t millions in sales it’s basically a couple of thousand copies in the first days.
Raising the fee would hurt devs on a budget, like devs outside high income countries and students.
Something I tried to do earlier to help with it, in this very channel, was a “Downvote any game you’ve heard of before” thread. It was a nice exercise to help people post odd games no one had heard of.
What I had heard was that they were looking for other hooks into the operating system that weren’t as deep, not that they were removing the deeper hooks.
I’ve been using Linux full time for around 3 or 4 years. I just bought a Legion Go handheld gaming PC, which comes with Windows.
I knew before I bought it that I was going to load Linux on it instead, but decided to check out the Windows experience a little out of curiosity first. Holy fucking shit, it was a shitshow. A buggy mess and terrible experience .
And you hang out in the online communities for devices like this and you will see even totally nontechnical users who have no dog in the fight for a Linux bias are still vastly preferring the Linux experience. This is completely unprecedented.
Anticheat is the only thing Microsoft has ‘‘going for them’’’ if you can even put it that way. Really starts to feel like Windows is toast.
It’s interesting, anticheat and the xbox game pass are the only things stopping me from changing my main OS over. Not many other reasons to keep it, really.
I gave up game pass, i looked into paying more to be able to stream games from it… but i decided it just was not worth it… at some point the great deal is going to become shitty…
I don’t regret dropping it and have just used steam…
I also didn’t play games that had kernel level anti cheat… just never seemed worth it
I can’t say the same, I enjoy some competitive games from time to time and would rather not maintain two OSs just for when I want to play one.
For now, game pass is a great value. Once they inevitably raise the price and restrict things for pc users, I’ll gladly drop it. I’ll get a lot of value out of it until then though!
In Spain you can use bizum, which is a system made by Spanish banks. I’ve been reading that it’s supposed to be interoperative with other european systems but I’ve never used that way personally.
The ECB have been working in the digital euro for ages, which is supposed to allow payments directly processed by the ECB. But it is taking ages…
I think Wero is supposed to become the replacement for all of that, though I’m not sure if it’s gonna have similar features. For now it’s only available in a few countries unfortunately.
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