“In Feb. 2024, Stardew Valley reached 30 million copies sold, and if we assume each copy sold for $15, that means that the game could have generated a revenue of $450 million. A modest 10 percent profit margin puts ConcernedApe’s earnings at $45 million, a number that is likely to increase in the future.” Source: https://dotesports.com/stardew-valley/news/how-much-money-di...
TBH the profit margin on this game is probably closer to 100% than 10%, it was a solo-dev game so never much overhead, I think one guy was hired to work on it.
30% off the top for most stores (Valve/Steam, Apple/iPhone, Google/Android, etc), then around 50% taxes between state, local... some fixed expenses and overhead. It's probably well under 20% in the bank after all is said and done. That said, it's still a lot of money.
The highest marginal combined tax rate in the U.S. is 51.8% (37+10.9+3.9, assuming an NYC address).
However, this is business income, not compensation, so it's taxed on a net basis, not a gross basis (even though it may still be included on his personal income tax return). This means his taxable income is the amount left after taking into account the retailer's fees, subcontractor costs, etc.
So, for example, if he made $100 selling games, $30 would go to the store. Assuming no expenses and overhead (since we have no data to come up with those numbers), the remaining $70 would be subject to tax. Assuming he lived in NYC, he would pay up to $36.26 in combined taxes (not taking into account the SALT deduction or the progressive tax rate calculation), for a post-tax net of at least $33.74. Assuming he lived in WA as other commenters note, he would pay up to $25.9 in federal taxes, for a post-tax net of no less than $44.1. (But note: Washington has an excise tax on businesses which is based on gross income...)
Stardew likely qualifies for the reduced store cuts. Steam _lowers_ the percentage for a game when it sells high. Still somewhere between 10 and 25%, though.
Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
This, however, is one area where eventually Epic Games shines — they take a much lower cut and if they increase in popularity with gamers then steam might be forced to lower their share.
This is basically almost public information: 25% cut on earnings between $10 million and $50 million.
Yet most likely very big share of sales is well below $10 let alone $15 due to sales and regional pricing.
So yeah I doubt numbers anywhere close to those adverised.
> Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
Steam no longer provide any discoverability on its own unless you either bring your own community ftom outside or spend $10,000-100,000 on marketing to gain wishlists.
If you're small 2-10 people indie gamedev studio and have external funding Valve will earn more from your game than you.
In this case, as a solo dev, it's probably quite justified to be honest. I doubt ConcernedApe would have really been able to continue solo-ing it with this level of success if he also had to maintain distribution channels, sales/returns, marketing, legal stuff on a global scale.
It's probably the big name studios who already have entire departments to do that kind of stuff that feel they're being ripped off.
Actually the more you earn the worse the deal is - he's probably paid about $100 million for what amounts to $100,000s of labor if he paid people to take care of this stuff, and some (low) millions in taxes collected for various jurisdictions. Dude's personally bought Gabe a ship in exchange for some accounting.
When you're talking millions in income it can be that high depending on your state... IIRC, as peer comment mentions, Washington doesn't have state taxes, you still have a nominal rate for Federal at 38% though, and I'm not sure about sales, property or other taxes, which again, likely approach or exceed 50% against total income.
Just checked, seems it's now 37% for the top federal bracket... for what it's worth, I think it's amoral to tax more than half of what someone makes, regardless of how much they make.
Came here to recommend this book. It is fantastic. There are nine other games covered besides Stardew Valley. Some are great, some not so great, but the stories behind each one are excellent.
Not really, what they actually do for most games is basically what Google and Apple do: a token review, then nothing apart from some niceties for players. Then they pocket an immense profit, it came out in one of Epic's cases that Valve net $50 million/year profit per employee.
The only thing for developers they still do better than Google and Apple really is a few promotions throughout the year that target specific genres for released games developers can register for (whereas Google and Apple select the games they promote), and the "Next Fest" 3x a year for unreleased games.
They used to do stuff like "visibility rounds" that would reach 100,000s of people who didn't know about your game - the same feature today targets people who already wishlisted your game, so these days most developers have to put significant effort and money into promoting their Steam page on other channels like tiktok/youtube/reddit.
Well, plus there's the whole version management and packaging and hosting and distributing giant amounts of data.
If you are an indie team that makes a 50GB game and has 50k players, distributing and update management would be a gargantuan task without Steam or something like it. 2.5 petabytes of bandwidth isn't cheap.
Yes what they do is profitable, I'm not saying that it isn't. But paying for what they do is (clearly) still more attractive to developers than rolling their own infrastructure to do the same.
That firehose isn't pointed at everyone, being the newest game on Steam has a very fleeting value and then it's on you to find customers. It used to be that Steam played a much more active role in spreading traffic around games but these days the median game is doing $1,000 - $2,000 in sales which is like 100 - 200 copies sold. It's more and more like Google and Apple where what you get out of it is just a function of how much you spend on customer acquisition, how well you reach social media, and whether you can leverage these to become popular enough to achieve prominence.
Everyone launches on Steam because they are an utterly-entrenched monopoly, all other PC game distribution channels are collectively a very small percent.
The firehose only ever pointed at "everyone" back when Valve was hand-picking every game that got released on Steam. Back then we only saw a few games released every week, and because of that they got that much more attention. But that also meant that most games never got any attention on Steam, since they were never released there.
However, Valve has since removed most barriers to entry and these days Steam sees more than 350 releases every week (nearly 20k in 2025), a number that is constantly growing. Add to the fact that there are already more than 130,000 games on Steam, that every new release has to compete with, and it is no wonder that median sales are low:
The low barrier to entry means that a lot of crappy games being released on Steam, that were never going to sell a lot, and the actually good games have to compete with all the other good games on the platform, that are probably also being sold at a much greater discount than your newly released title
Right, all the games that they think will be successful. Most games won't- it's a power law market.
There's nothing preventing a game dev from selling exclusively on their own site. It's not as though Steam has exclusive access to Windows customers like the App/Play Store do on their platforms. Steam earns its customers and their trust and developers follow.
And the decision to risk years of his life spent on a project that might not pan out. IIRC he was largely supported by his girlfriend during development and he worked in a cinema. That's in contrast to a job at a studio where you get a salary for your time whether it succeeds or not.
Of the purchase price that the end-user pays, the retailer has to pay tax. That knocks off a variable percentage. It would be 20% in the UK.
There's also the cost of selling through Steam / Google Play / Whatever - typically 30%.
I assume the developer has some professional expenses - an accountant at a minimum, probably a lawyer, certainly insurance. Maybe they also have a PR team, advertising, and the like. I don't know whether they pay for testers, translators, and things like that.
Then we get on to things like buying a new development machine, going to tech conferences, taking an educational course, backups, and all the other things that a business needs to spend on in order to be effective.
Maybe a profit margin of 10% is unrealistically low - but developing software has legitimate costs. The margin is never going to be 100%.
What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is? They make cents on every can. Something like 2-3%.
The video games industry is filled to the brim with gatekeepers who take their cuts. Valve takes 30%, just for their store. Publishers start at 10%. Your engine might take a cut.
Estimating that Stardew Valley, the big success video game with the lowest overhead bar none, has made 10% profit might be too low. 20%? Might be high.
He used this open source engine, it is free. He is almost certainly getting between 60-70% of revenue after distribution fees. His only other expenses are taxes and the other devs he employs and he was solo until the game made like $100 million. Most of the copies sold for $15 so it seems fair to me to say his companies lifetime revenue is close to $10*number of units sold which is close to half a billion dollars. And since the companies expenses are effectively zero profit is the same. If he’s smart with taxes he’s paid 15% corporate tax rate then 15% capital gains rate which comes out to just under 28% so his own lifetime earnings is probably around $360 million.
> What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is?
For whom? The manufacture? It's closer to 10-30% for the manufacture (lower for white label goods, higher for "premium" brands). And it's higher for products that enjoy monopoly status.
For retailers, it's 2-3%, but retailers also get products on loan and negotiate various agreements that help cover the costs of displays, shipping, marketing, and wastage. So even that small percentage margin is skewed a bit.
There's a reason that retailers and food manufactures ("canned goods") were some of the largest American companies prior to technology taking off. It's a highly profitable industry.
> What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is?
Um, exactly the sort of numbers that you're providing. I'm baffled by the question or what possible relevance you thought it had here.
> 10% profit might be too low. 20%? Might be high.
You think an indie game like the one in question is making less on each copy sold than Valve is making on it? That's nuts. If the creator isn't clearing 50% on each marginal unit sold, then something is seriously wrong.
Besides tax and the store's cut, the games also regularly sales and prices-changes. So you can't just extrapolate the price today with the amount of units sold and assume this to be the revenue.
I can't recall if it was Falstad or which other simulator code I read, but it had "connect this one terminal to ground via multi-Gigaohm resistor for stability" sprinkled throughout the code for capacitors and similar components.
It is likely that that the sub had it's antenna tuned to work well in water while the RC car antenna was tuned for open air. The two different mediums will change the antenna impedance.
Interesting does say shorter antenna, I could see that, I think the RC sub's antenna was like 4in long vs. an rc car's antenna that's usually like a foot
Yeah, my basic understanding of submarine communications is that lower frequencies penetrate the water better. Lower wavelength needs a longer antenna. The system US subs use is a very low frequency from what I understand.
> TACAMO (take charge and move out) is the back up communications system to the US nuclear submarine fleet in case an attack on land based transmitters disables them. A rotating fleet of Navy E6 jets equipped with 200 KW transmitters and two 2½-mile-long trailing wire antennas (TWA) at 35,000 ft altitude to provide 24/7 coverage. Short pings are transmitted every few seconds.
Regarding "longer antenna" for submarines... -- I recently learned about this signal from https://www.sigidwiki.com/ -- which has been helpful to ID all the fun stuff you can see with RTLSDR
The cost of that must be insane - the price tag of being about the only military force on this rock capable of projecting force and delivering utter devastation 24/7/365 any place any time even if the entirety of the US got glassed.
Should we also stop adding iodide to salt or fortifying white bread? I see your point, but society has benefited as a whole by forcing some of these substances onto populations. I think it's fairly evident that many humans in the US are either unable or unwilling to really care about their health.
Bad analogy. Fortified food provide nutrients to supplement what you get from other foods. One can simply choose to buy white bread that's fortified, or whole foods that have those nutrients naturally.
You can't avoid water for too long though. Ingesting whatever is in the water supply is mandatory. I can't avoid flouride in my water any more than I can avoid Nitrogen when I breathe. I have no choice in the matter. It's the lack of choice that many object to, not the health effects of flouride per se.
Personally, if given the choice, I'd probably still take flouride. Having it in the water is convenient. Mandatory, but convenient.
https://speechpulse.com does fully local audio transcription. The UI and settings are not the most intuitive, but it works fairly well and they are making constant updates.
Side note, I really wish software would stop using EE terminology to name things. Ohm, Capacitor, Electron, etc. It muddies up search results for no good reason. Is there a reason this has become a trend lately?
Ohm is presumably called that because it's based on OMeta, which was called that because it was a successor to META-II that had inheritance, like OO languages.
More generally, I suspect software programmers have EE envy because electrical engineers build things that actually do work, and their designs get better over time.
Unfortunately its not a mirror. Some extensions have licensing issues that prevent them from being on open-vsx. For example PlatformIO. I ran into this issue earlier this week when trying to set up Windsurf which uses open-vsx.
