Indie games on Steam ‘unsustainable’ with median of just $1,400 over 5 years

From DailyBits: "A visualization showing various data about Steam games is making the rounds.

The numbers paint a bleak picture of the indie game market, showing that the top 25 percent of indie games in 2019 earn a median revenue of $12,000, which is dramatically down from $110,000 in 2013 . This is "obviously not sustainable" according to indie studio Grey Alien Games."

[Terry_B]

No wonder if 50% of all new indies are roguelikes, 2d platformers and not really innovative.

[Vits]

There is also the fact that back in 2013 for a game to get into Steam. It had to be good enough to get Valve's attention by itself or be good enough to convince a lot of people to vote for it through the Greenlight that was still in it's infancy and was infamous for not approving that many games.

And it's actually funny because the saturated Steam that we have now. Is a response to many developers complains that they couldn't get into the platform.

[MadLad]

Well, the median lowers a lot when you have to factor in thousands of shovelware dropped on and forgotten.

[Kados]

https://datastudio.google.c...

# of indie games released in Nov 2013 - 64
# of indie games released in Nov 2019 - 521

In 2013 most of the indie games on Steam were high quality, Steam actually had standards of entry back then.
They are being flooded with crap on a daily basis these days. All that garbage drags down the median.

[rainslacker]

Yeah. Publishers do take a good chunk of change to take on these indie projects, but they actually bring sales to the table. Self publishing can be successful, but the number of games which fail to return on investment is much greater. There are always those stand out games, but they are rare, and even the most popular indie games usually had a publisher behind them that made them popular because they knew how to make them popular.