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    How an estimated $151M splits when a solo dev sells 10M copies on Steam [OC]
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    How an estimated $151M splits when a solo dev sells 10M copies on Steam [OC]


    Estimated revenue breakdown for Schedule 1, the indie hit built by a solo 20-year-old Australian developer in Unity. Data sourced from public Steam analytics and standard industry rates (Valve's 30% cut, ~3% payment processing). Tax estimate based on Australia's top marginal rate (45% + 2% Medicare levy).

    Tool: sankeyflowstudio.com

    Posted by prezbotyrion

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    44 Comments

    2. joestaff on

      Good for them. I mean, they lose about 66% of the profit, but it’s still ‘rest of your life’ money.

    6. ckdarby on

      One of the worst data put togethers.

      Valve’s is reduced below 30% at those numbers and can be found on their docs. That also includes processing fees.

      Nobody is drawing $100M personally directly like this. We did $1M gross on Steam and had a CPA involved right away 😂 

    9. Bad_Commit_46_pres on

      guy hit the windfall and then didnt do anything to the game for a year update wise. already made the bank tho so i suppose there’s no reason for him to.

    10. JDoos on

      Assuming the solo developer is incorporated in Australia, the corporate tax rate is a flat 30% so

    11. Nestar47 on

      That unity pricing is gonna be incorrect at these ranges.
      Over 25M in revenue requires “enterprise” which is a negotiated number. I think previously it was 3k/seat, but given the ratio of revenue to seats I suspect they’d enforce some minimum seat count here, Probably aiming for something upwards of 1% total revenue.
      There’s articles from a few months ago mentioning minimum values at 250k as well for big sellers.

    12. urbanmember on

      the platform infrastructure and customer support is such a massive an highly valuable asset that the cut steam demands seems rather reasonable

    13. JDoos on

      Assuming the solo dev still set themselves up their business as a corporation in australia, their max tax rate would only be 30% so only AUS 30,351,000.00.

    18. Newwavecybertiger on

      I don’t know Australian tax law but they can probably get a better corporate tax rate than that.

    20. zephyrus299 on

      The taxes are a bit high, there’d be a bunch of rebates they’d qualify for and the logical thing is to put it into a business and take a salary from that over a while.

    24. Gigaton on

      People always got super mad about epic store never once taking into account they were offering to take like 5-10% instead of 35% like valve did.

    25. Cruzi2000 on

      That tax amount is only correct if you have an ABN as a sole trader, and the game was additional to income you are already receiving.

      ie: that is the top marginal rate, not the rate charged on ALL of your income.

    27. Bainin on

      Man if i knew i’d make this much money i’d move somewhere with a better tax cut asap haha

    31. arcanition on

      “Tax estimate based on Australia’s top marginal rate (45% + 2% Medicare levy).”

      Isn’t this inaccurate? The marginal rate isn’t applied to the entire income. Also nobody would take this income personally, they’d pay a CPA $100k to save 50% on the taxes.

    34. HUGE_FUCKING_ROBOT on

      when your game gets big enough do you get GabeN’s personal cellphone #?

    35. novruzj on

      When a game earns above a certain number, steam cut is reduced to 20-25%. Also how Steam spends what it receives is not public knowledge as far as I’m aware.

      3% for payment processing is also too much. Valve sends you money via Swift, why would you pay an additional 3%?

    37. stephanelshaarawy on

      Valve taking 1/3 of your revenue is some insane shit, it would be great to have more competition

    40. PwanaZana on

      Indie game dev is wild: 95% of miserable failure, 4.9% of getting minimum-wage equivalent, 0.1% become a multimillionaire.

    41. namrog84 on

      Sadly got the numbers a little off.

      * Steam takes 30% for up to $10M in sales
      * Steam takes 25% for up to $50M in sales, then 20% afterwards

      With this knowledge the result ends up being
      Steam with 33.2M and Dev SoloDev with 117.8M

      So with taxes thats a little over $10M more after taxes to bank account

    42. yalag on

      I’ve never heard of this thing before. Just now I looked it up and the game is ass. How did it manage to go viral?

    43. patrickhelm on

      Clearly this doesn’t take into account a good business structure and company profits vs sole trader. Tax amount is too high.