If a game is on Steam, it’s possible for a public observer to estimate how much money it made. The thing to look at is the number of reviews. There’s a fairly predictable ratio between the number of sales to the number of Steam reviews, about 30:1. Then you can multiply by the game price (accounting for discounts). Subtract 30% for Steam’s cut (or a smaller cut if the game was profitable enough). And if the game made under $1000, subtract $100 for Steam’s listing fee.

Let’s go through an example. Hollow Knight: Silksong currently has 394,000 reviews. That implies about 12M sales on Steam alone. Each sale is $20, and we’ll assume an average discount of 15%. In total that’s $200M revenue. For such a large game, Steam only takes a 20% cut, leaving the developers with $160M. Now, divide that among three developers over the course of 7 years of development, and the implied annual salary of each dev is $7.7M.

Of course, some of the work is done by contractors outside of the three main devs; for example, Silksong has a separate composer. But also, I’m leaving out future sales, and sales on other gaming platforms.

The Silksong devs make good money. But obviously Silksong is something of an outlier. Let’s look at another game.

Blightseed is a game I played last month, a conlang shoot ’em up. Very obscure, made by a solo dev, a bit of a buggy mess, but it’s completely unique and worth playing. Blightseed has 11 reviews at time of writing, which implies about 300 sales. Each sale is $7, and we’ll assume an average discount of 15%. That’s about $1800. Subtract Steam’s 30% cut, and that’s about $1300. I’m not sure how long it took to make this game, but I’d guess a single person could make this over the course of a year in their free time. Let’s say 250 hours, possibly an underestimate. So, about $5/hour.

That’s pretty decent for a hobby, considering most hobbies don’t pay any money at all. But as a job, that’s not good. Consider that making a game is somewhat technical, and perhaps a dev has the option of becoming a software engineer instead, paying (on the low end) around $100k/year, or $50/hour. In comparison, the $5/hour might as well round down to zero.

Now, you’ve heard of a lot more about hit indie games like Silksong than you have heard about obscure indie games like Blightseed. But of course, this is selection bias.  Blightseed is much closer to the typical case. In fact, Blightseed is above the median. Using similar methods, analysts have estimated that 40% of Steam games in 2025 didn’t make back the $100 listing fee, and 60% made under $1000.

So what about all those games that make negative profit? What’s their story? I can think of a few possibilities. a) These are failed games. They’re losing lottery tickets. A swing and a miss. b) Steam is functioning as a vanity press. The devs are accomplishing what they set out to do, which was publishing games, not making money. c) They’re making money elsewhere, such as selling DLC.

When talking about whether a game is successful, we have to consider how many people worked on it for how long, and what their goals were. If you’re a professional developer, $5/hour doesn’t really cut it. But if you’re doing it on the side, with the hope of breaking into the career, it might be a decent starting point.

And when you’re a hobbyist, the money barely matters. Even if you completely lose $100 to the Steam listing fee, it’s still cheaper per hour to develop video games than it is to play them. What matters to the hobbyist is whatever they find emotionally satisfying.