@thomasmahler My game cost $10M to make? But who took this money? I took this money for making the game?

@ZenoRogue With publishers you usually get paid per completed milestone. So yes, you took this money to pay salaries.

@thomasmahler That means we should all become publishers, not gamedevs /s

@YulianRyder Publishers don’t have it easy at all either. Now you have to deal with artists and designers, fragile egos, you have to make the right bets or lose millions of dollars, you take the upfront risk and there’s plenty of other funding options out there now you’re competing with.

@thomasmahler You can definitely make a good game that costs less that 10 million

@SverunGames I mean... lol, I literally just took a number to make the math easy. If your game costs 1m USD to make, just remove one digit. Boom, magic! 😂🤣

@thomasmahler 70/30 seems insane. Is that standard? I get they take the risk but still…

@RotemPotem Oh, I’ve seen publisher deals that were 94/6 🤣😂

@thomasmahler Legit question. Why do the dev teams need to be so much bigger/expensive than they used to be? In the early 2000s, AAA games were made by much smaller teams.

@AnthonysCustoms They don’t necessarily have to be - it just depends on what product you’re making. Graphics and fidelity in early 2000s games were still quite rudimentary. Warcraft 3 came out in 2002, so let’s use that as an example. Do you think gamers would be happy with graphics like that

@thomasmahler No f cking way a game that cost 10M to produce will be sold for 20 bucks 🙄

@SKulkri Happens all the time. Gamers are EXTREMELY price sensitive. Sell your game for 30$ or 40$ and suddenly your sales expectations will get cut in half or even less than that - and it might then only perform well during steep sales.

@thomasmahler This really puts ‘indie success’ in perspective. Curious, do you think more transparent rev share models (like Epic’s 88/12) or direct-to-consumer storefronts could ever realistically break the Steam monopoly? Or are discounts and visibility too powerful to walk away from?

@kiLtuzan7 I mean, I love Steam and we all know that Steam is fantastic. It’s just that their 30% platform fee is just extremely aggressive.

@thomasmahler personally, i play games. i don’t need devs complaining about finances to me or trying to justify price hikes. if AAAA studio wants to charge 100, i wont get loud.

@n050up4u1 Some people took this as me complaining - I wasn’t complaining at all, obviously Moon has done incredibly well so far, so knock on wood… 👍 I just constantly see gamers and even indie devs say all the wrong things about the economics behind game development, so I wanted to

@JSWLCK

@thomasmahler Self-publishing is the way. What you described is way worse than employment, given how much more effort it takes to run a business.

@thomasmahler I've been making games for nearly 2 decades, I've worked on indie, AA, AAA, and back to indie. It is extremely hard to make money in this industry, even if you make good gross the net is usually 15%, with luck. Depending on where you live and how much taxes you pay.

@thomasmahler Moral of the story is: Don't get a publisher if you're going on Steam.

@thomasmahler You forgot to mention salaries and office rent, in case you’re not a solo dev and want to have a small space to work with your team. Depending where you live and how much people you hire that can also be a decent chunk of the overall earnings.

@thomasmahler How ON EARTH does it cost 10 million to make a video game? Let's assume 5 years dev time... how many coders do you need? Let's say UI, Combat, Multiplayer, and a few msc others, that's 6 coders. How many artists do you need? for 5 years 1 environment artist, an animator and a

@thomasmahler If the game costed 10M, is it still indie?

@thomasmahler "Success doesn’t equal freedom." This says so much about modernity I don't even want to get into it.