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Originally Posted by Solecismic
One question is whether Steam is even still interested in indie developers, given Newell's comments about moving away from Greenlight. This could simply be a waste of time and money.
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I don't think Gabe Newell's comments on moving away from Greenlight were an indication that they're not interested in Indie developers anymore, he commented that the problem is that it's
a bottleneck in the way of releasing more titles.
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Anyway, I'm interested in arguments pro and con.
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As far as pros and cons on sales side:
Gamasutra: David Galindo's Blog - How much do indie PC devs make, anyways? (Part V)
The Steam Launch
On October 8th, 2013, just a few days shy of one year since CSD officially launched, the game landed on Steam. And in just one day, I had made nearly $15,000 in gross sales, which was almost as much as I made in the entire last year on PC/Mac/Linux for CSD. In two days, I surpassed it. In one week, I had made over $50,000 in gross revenue… more than I did in the last three years as a game maker and barista. My family couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. Finally, I felt redeemed. This was a path that was more than a dozen years in the making, but I had finally made it.
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Steam Total
So the total so far for Steam? After the normal revenue share and such, I’ve made over $130,000 in just three months on Steam. Typing that number still makes me shake my head. That’s impossible! No way. No. Way.
The grand total of units sold across all platforms is 52,539. That’s so much larger than anything I could have imagined, and so far daily sales average around 40-60 copies sold per day across all platforms (excluding sales/major promotional days).
Gamasutra - Defender's Quest: By the Numbers, Part 2
Full Steam Ahead
Everyone knows you can make a lot of money on Steam. But how, much, exactly? And what about other platforms? Let's break it down:
Steam, unsurprisingly, is the lion's share of the market. However, over 40 percent of our revenue came from other sources -- and direct sales are still our number 2 source of overall revenue.
If you combine direct revenue + Kongregate Kreds, 32.6 percent of all revenue was earned outside of the major portals.
The first thing this chart tells me is that you should sell your game direct! Not only is it a big piece of the pie, you also get to keep most of the money (92 percent!), and build a direct relationship with those customers that no platform holder can yank away from you.
Besides, we would have never gotten on Steam and GOG had we not built up a base of direct sales to convince them with first.
The con that I think deserves mention is that a lot of the revenue comes from being featured in sales:
The problem with that for indie developers is that there's no guarantee about being featured and getting the front page visibility that comes with those sales. Developers can set their own sales now, but it probably won't be as successful without being featured as one of the first things people see when they log onto Steam.