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  • Xbox price hike might be a positive, Dev keeps 42% of Steam Revenue

Xbox price hike might be a positive, Dev keeps 42% of Steam Revenue

Also three.js is awesome, and Playdate is now a Robot

Author

Code Monkey
July 14, 2024

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It’s awesome how that course starts from the absolute basics, like how code executes line by line, and goes until advanced topics like Multithreading. Definitely looking forward to finishing both the Premium version and the Free videos on YouTube.

  • Game Dev: Xbox Price Hike, Steam Revenue Math

  • Tech: Three.js

  • Fun: Playdate Robot

Game Dev

Xbox price hike might be a good thing?

A while ago Xbox announced that Call of Duty will be coming to Game Pass on Day 1, that's still true but now the price for getting Day 1 access on Game Pass has gone up across all tiers by about 20%.

No one likes price hikes so naturally people aren't happy, but this is also might have a positive effect.

For a while now people have been saying how Game Pass being so cheap and such a great deal was actively devaluing games, there's always people saying "Why pay $15 for an indie game when I can get tons of AAA for $10?"

So in that sense this price hike might help counteract that sentiment and allow more indie devs to make profitable games.

I self-publish all my small games so I don't necessarily experience these issues of gamers devaluing games since I don't need to sell hundreds of thousands of copies to break even. But over the past few years I have heard mid-size indies talk about how hard it is to get funding, partly because of the world economy but also partly because of Game Pass making it harder for mid-tier games to survive.

So perhaps this price hike, while annoying, might be a positive for a more sustainable well-rounded games industry.

Game Dev

Devs keep just 42%?

Whenever an indie publishes their first game they are always surprised to see how little money they keep in the end. It's easy to calculate gross revenue, it's just sales multiplied by price, but definitely don't assume that amount is what ends up in your pocket.

One developer posted on Reddit their math and found they end up with 42% and yup that's the rough math although it's actually lower than that.

The one thing missing in that list is Refunds/Chargebacks which can be as low as 5% or as high as 25%. Then out of copies sold in Europe Steam collects VAT, then takes their 30%, then US withholding (which depends on tax treaties), then they send you the remainder which you then pay taxes on.

So whenever you do market research to guesstimate how much your game might make, keep in mind this difference between gross and net.

I was definitely surprised when I got my first Steam paycheck, and then even more surprised when I realized I still had to pay taxes heh.

In my case, taxes in Portugal are pretty high, so I keep around 38% of the gross. Meaning if you buy my game Dinky Guardians for the normal $15 price, at the end I get about $5.70 in my bank account. Thankfully that has been enough for me to make a living as an indie dev for 10 years!

Tech

three.js is AWESOME!

three.js is a Javascript library meant to help you render 3D objects in a browser. All the code is available on GitHub and the documentation and samples look excellent!

There's already a lot of examples, full fledged 3D online shooter games, adventure games. Even non-game apps like Canon's interactive website and some fun toys.

From what I can tell it uses WebGL, but one interesting technology that is in active development is WebGPU which would give the browser more direct access to the GPU itself. So if this is already so capable with WebGL I can't wait to see what this tech will look like in a few years. Unity is also working on a WebGPU integration to their browser export.

By the way this topic came up during my members-only livestream that I do every week. Someone mentioned a browser game which looked amazing, it's impressive what you can do in the browser.

I have seen a bunch of three.js gifs on Twitter every now and then, but I wasn't aware of just how good it was!

This, and Unity's upcomping WebGPU integration, makes me wonder if in the future we will see a resurgence of web games.

I got my start making Flash games and it was amazing. Anyone could make a game and put it online and tons of people could play it without having to download anything. That really helped me a lot in getting tons of feedback and improving really quickly. It would be awesome if such a thing happened again.

Fun

Playdate into a Robot!

You might have heard about the Playdate, it's a cute mini-console with a bunch of games. Now someone took that and added some parts to make it into a quirky robot!

It moves around and has some nice cartoony facial expressions. Pretty fun project!

I love the creativity on display here. The Playdate was already a cute device by itself, adding a robot with facial expressions is an excellent idea!

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Thanks for reading!

Code Monkey

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