The PC platform also passed 42 million peak concurrent users a few weeks ago.
    • Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3 months

      and considering that there were over 120k games released on steam as of 2025 😵‍💫

      game development is not the goldmine some think it is, i think there’s even a stat that half the games on steam don’t ever make more than 500$

      i’d love to see a graph of the number of steam games VS the money they made. i’d guess that graph would look very exponential

      • CMLVI@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3 months

        I feel like you’d have to control for the obvious asset flips or just random, I guess, spam games thrown out on a daily basis. I don’t think it’d move the needle that much tho

        • 123@programming.devEnglish
          3 months

          Then you’d also need to remove already successful “evergreen” titles in that case, which might land you back into the same. Not a lot of money for new games.

          • CMLVI@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3 months

            True. Gaming landscape feels weird rn, looking at it from current standing. Tough sledding for aspiring devs. I’m also right about that age where nostalgia tends to make everything new look a bit less shiny, so I may be choosing not to see the best current offerings.

    • doublah@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3 months

      In the US maybe, $100k is several years wages in many countries.

      • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zipEnglish
        3 months

        Ok… Most of those are probably American made games. And even if it’s 3 devs, that’s not enough to keep most studios open, even tiny ones.

        The point was it’s not a lot.

  • Ryoae@piefed.socialEnglish
    3 months

    He conceded that earning $100,000 could mean wild success for one team or “total disaster” for another, but reiterated his belief that “dramatically more games” are finding success on the PC storefront.

    I don’t know with that. I think most teams would be happier getting more than 100k. If you’re an indie team and you’re driven by how well you want your game to go, I would think you’d like to make more than 100k. Especially given how games bigger than yours go to multi-million statuses.

    Also he never described what number of said team that 100k would be good for. I think maybe a 2-person team. But more than 2, like 10, then making 100k would be considered a total disaster scenario.

    • ViatorOmnium@piefed.socialEnglish
      3 months

      100k is not enough to pay even a single full time dev, so I wouldn’t call this the success threshold.

      • Starski@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3 months

        How? That’s over double what I make in a year, living in America too. Are game devs required to like eat something super expensive every day?

        • ViatorOmnium@piefed.socialEnglish
          3 months

          Because despite all the LLM slopaganda the laws of supply and demand give software engineers some leverage over prospective employers.

          • Starski@lemmy.zipEnglish
            3 months

            I see there was a fundamental misunderstanding, you see I thought you meant that 100k wasn’t enough for someone to survive on, you simply meant that Software engineers have high standards.

    • BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.worldEnglish
      3 months

      So 113k released between 2016 and 2025 is about 12600 a year. We have only been told that 5863 games made more than 100k last year, not what their total lifetime revenues are. Bearing in mind games generally make the most money in the first year of release (of course there there is big variation and there is a tail but mostly), then very crudely as much as 46% of new games could be making at least 100K in the first year. That’s an overestimate for many reasons but 5% is also a huge underestimate as the figure is using at all games released across 9 years and diluting the the 1 year figure we have. Also we need to bare in mind how much of the Steam library is slop and not an actual fully formed game, or is place holder entries for things like demos and even DLC.

      The real figure will sit between those two extreme limits, it’s not going to be as low as 5% but also not as high as 46%.