Game Dev

Only 32% of games made $500

One developer has collected data on all the AA and Indie Games that made at least $500 on Steam in 2024, there's some interesting takeaways.

In 2024 there were 18,000 games released, but when applying this filter (over $500 revenue) that number drops down significantly to just over 5,000 games. This is one of those stats that sounds really bad but in reality it's actually a good thing. Meaning, if you're treating game dev as a profession, then you're not competing with all those 18k games, your competition is much much smaller.

Then filtering it even further into Hobbyist (<$10k), Indie (<$50M) and AA (<$500M). The median revenue for Hobbyists was $1,385 and for Indie it was $20,105.

As usual the results are very top heavy, the top 10% of games make up 85% of all the revenue. Meaning the remaining 15% is split across the remaining 90% of games.

Balatro was at the top with $28M, then Supermarket Simulator at $27M, Chained Together $22M, TCG Card Shop Simulator $20M.

Interestingly there is a big gap in median revenue between Self-Published ($3,285) and with Publisher ($16,222), I guess nowadays there are more good publishers than bad? Although naturally it comes at a cost and is not guaranteed.

In terms of genres, Casual and Simulation are up top (along with Singleplayer). At the bottom you have Puzzle Platformer, Match-3, and Party. And in terms of highest median revenue per genre, NSFW is at the very top. If you're into those types of games then they are apparently quite profitable.

There is a Google Sheet with all the data if you want to analyze it yourself. And there is another post with data on the Top 50 games and also including AAA. Apparently Black Myth: Wukong made almost $1B! And Palworld made almost $500M.

Affiliate

FREE Car Controller, Fresh Assets, SFX Bundle

Start the year FRESH with the new Asset Store Sale!

Recent assets 50% OFF! There’s a Global Illumination tool, Stylized Water, Colorize, Grid and Inventory system, as well as tons of visuals and effects. Whatever new prototype ideas you have, maybe get something to help you build them!

Check the page HERE to see everything on sale.

The Publisher of the Week this time is Ash Dev, lots of tools to help you make Car games.

Get the FREE Arcade Vehicle Physics which helps you easily set up a great car controller. Super easy way to start working on your next Racing game prototype.

Get it HERE and use coupon ASHDEV at checkout to get it for FREE!

Need any Sounds or Music? Get the latest HumbleBundle!

Adding sound to your games is one of the easiest ways to make it feel 10x more awesome. This bundle is 98% OFF and contains a massive amount of variety to suit every game, every genre.

Over 40 hours of audio tracks and 6000 individual effects for just $20! Get it HERE!

Game Dev

Why is this so satisfying?

Look at this Gif, I think it looks really awesome! Simple in terms of game design but feels like it would be very satisfying to play.

One fun exercise you can always do is look at games that look super polished, like this one, and spend some time analyzing WHY it looks so awesome. Try to identify all the tiny little details that make it look and feel so satisfying.

In this example:

• Screen shake when a car explodes

• The explosion particle effect is actually made up of multiple effects, there's the explosion, the circle on the ground, and the "meteors" that fly forward along with momentum

• Smoke puffs that come out of the explosion and as the destroyed cars hit the ground

• Concrete barricades at the top/bottom of the level help sell the sense of speed

• Speed trails behind the players cars

• Bloom effect to make the explosions glow bright

• Cars glow red-hot when exploding

• Great color design, the red really pops out compared to the grey cars

If you took all those away then this exact same game would feel much more boring to play.

This is by the same developer that made Instruments of Destruction, another excellently polished game.

Tech

Handwritten AI

Do you like handwriting your notes? There are a bunch of really cool looking displays nowadays like reMarkable, I've wanted to get one of those for quite a while since I do enjoy writing some things by hand (like game design).

Then AIs nowadays are already extremely good at identifying handwritten text, so one developer put those two together. You can handwrite your notes, then send the "image" to some AI which then reads what the text says and does something. So you can handwrite some AI prompts like "Draw a Picture of a Chihuahua. Use Simple line art" and it does exactly that!

It's definitely an interesting experiment, this format might make it easier to treat AI like a brainstorming partner. Just handwrite some notes and talk back and forth with the AI. Or perhaps you're handwriting some math homework, you can ask the AI to help you explain something if you get stuck. Or of course you can ask it to draw some diagrams that you can then use in your handwritten notes. Lots of interesting use cases!

Fun

TikTok but it's Wikipedia

Some people say TikTok (and social media/the internet in general) is responsible for more and more brain rot, making everyone dumber. Personally I think that's more due to what people choose to watch rather than what exists on the internet, there's tons of awesome educational or just interesting content all over the place, it's not just mindless entertainment, you just have to look for it.

Meet WikiTok, someone took TikTok, but instead of having silly videos it's all about showing you various Wikipedia pages!

It's the same concept, a never ending infinite scroll, but instead of seeing some random guy get hit with a pie, you can learn about the COLLAPS experiment, apparently it's something inside CERN that investigates state properties of exotic short lived nuclei, neat!

It would be nice if there was a way to add some filters, like just show me pages related to Game Development or Tech, that would be a fun addition!