How to make money from indie games, store by store

Each game needs a 100 USD Steam Direct fee, returned once it earns 1,000 USD, so a free game with no purchases never gets it back. The Steam publishing guide covers the full cost and timeline.

Valve keeps 30% of revenue by default. Since October 1, 2018, the share drops to 25% on a game's earnings beyond 10 million USD and to 20% beyond 50 million USD, counting game packages, DLC, in-game sales and Community Marketplace fees. For almost every indie game, 30% is the number to plan with.

Two timing rules shape the plan. The Coming Soon page must be public for at least two weeks before release, and Steam's content survey asks you to disclose AI-generated content that ships with the game or is generated while it runs. The full Steam checklist is in the publishing guide linked below.

itch.io lets the seller decide what percentage of each sale goes to itch.io, anywhere from 0% to 100%, with 10% as the default. Stripe and PayPal charge their own processing fee of 2.9% plus 0.30 USD per transaction. Revenue becomes available 7 days after a purchase, and staff review payouts before paying, typically within 10 to 14 days.

It is the easiest place to sell a first game, a demo or a jam game, and pay what you want pricing lets players tip above a minimum. It is also a good place to test a price or an idea before paying for a Steam page. Many developers use both, itch.io for early builds and Steam for the main launch.

Web portals do not sell games. They show them to a large audience for free and share the ad revenue. Poki gives you 100% of revenue from players you bring directly and splits 50/50 on players it brings, and asks for web exclusivity while Steam, app stores and consoles stay yours. CrazyGames shares ad revenue, allows optional in-game purchases, and pays monthly once your balance reaches 100 EUR.

The size rules are the real gate. CrazyGames caps the initial download at 50 MB, or 20 MB to appear on its mobile homepage, with 250 MB and 1,500 files in total. Poki notes that players tend to move on if loading takes more than 10 seconds. YouTube Playables requires an initial bundle under 30 MiB and recommends under 15 MiB. A game built for portals is designed small from the first day.

Portals only take web builds, and web export is not available in Summer yet. If the web is your main market, build for it with a web-first tool from the start. If you build in Summer, Steam and itch.io downloads are the release path today.

The Apple Developer Program costs 99 USD a year, and the App Store Small Business Program lowers Apple's commission to 15% for developers with up to 1 million USD in proceeds. Google Play charges a one-time 25 USD registration fee. Personal Play Console accounts created after November 13, 2023 must run a closed test with at least 12 testers opted in for 14 days in a row before they can publish to production.

iOS and Android builds need that platform's toolchain and signing (the Android SDK and a keystore, or a Mac with Xcode for iOS) and a pass on touch input. Plan the business model with the controls. A game funded by ads or in-app purchases is designed differently from a paid PC game, so decide which one it is before you build.

On Steam, everyone who has your game on their wishlist gets an email or mobile notification when it releases, and again when a discount of at least 20% runs for more than 8 hours. That is why wishlists are worth more than follower counts. Valve itself says there is no formula that accurately predicts sales from wishlists, so treat any forecast as a range.

The best public data comes from Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo, summarized on the How To Market A Game benchmarks page. In his June 2020 data, median first-week sales, counting every sale that week and not only wishlist conversions, were about 15% of launch wishlists for games with fewer than 5,000, 20% for 5,000 to 39,999, 23% for 40,000 to 99,999, and 25% above 100,000. A game launching with 5,000 wishlists would land around 1,000 first-week sales at the median, and individual games land well above or below it.

The practical rule is to start collecting wishlists months before launch and to launch when the count justifies it, not when the calendar says so. The marketing guide covers what actually moves the number.

Gamalytic estimated the median revenue of a game released on Steam in 2024 at 222 USD, and 249 USD for 2025 releases up to October 2025. Most games do not pay for the time that went into them, so plan the first commercial game as one that can survive earning very little.

So keep the first commercial game small, spend little on it, put the store page up early, and measure. A game that earns back its costs and teaches you what players respond to has done its job, and the next one starts with an audience.