Enough for one dev for a year ...such success.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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and considering that there were over 120k games released on steam as of 2025 π΅βπ«
game development is not the goldmine some think it is, i think thereβs even a stat that half the games on steam donβt ever make more than 500$
iβd love to see a graph of the number of steam games VS the money they made. iβd guess that graph would be very exponential looking
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
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.
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.
And somehow that's actually better odds than getting a good job after university 1.2m applicants for 17k graduates
In the US maybe, $100k is several years wages in many countries.
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.
steamdb says that over 19000 games were released in 2025.
5863/19000 represents roughly 30% of the games released on the platform.
I honestly thought this percentage was going to be way lower. Almost 1/3 is being able to earn over 100k? This seems like a success ratio way bigger than other content creation platforms, unless my math is ignoring a key factor.
I don't think the 5863 is limited to games released in 2025
that changes the math... a bit...
100k is not enough to pay even a single full time dev, so I wouldn't call this the success threshold.
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?
Because despite all the LLM slopaganda the laws of supply and demand give software engineers some leverage over prospective employers.
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.