Where you can sell an indie game
You have more options than Steam, and it is worth knowing what each one is actually good for before you commit your effort.
- Steam: the dominant PC storefront and where most premium indie games earn the majority of their revenue. Best discovery potential, most competition.
- itch.io: creator friendly, fast to publish, flexible revenue share, and great for demos, game jams, experimental work and direct sales to an existing audience. Much smaller commercial scale.
- Epic Games Store: smaller catalogue and a more favourable revenue share, but discovery is limited and access is more curated.
- Consoles (Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox): meaningful revenue for the right games, but each requires approval, certification and porting work.
- Direct sales: selling keys or builds from your own site gives you the best margin, but you supply all the traffic yourself.
What it costs to sell on Steam
Two costs matter. First, Steam Direct charges a fee per title to publish, which is recoupable once the game earns enough, so treat it as a deposit rather than a pure expense. At the time of writing that fee is 100 USD per game.
Second, Steam takes a revenue share on every sale, commonly cited as 30 percent and reducing at high revenue tiers that most indies will not reach. On top of that, regional taxes and payment processing apply, and refunds reduce your net. The practical point: model your take-home, not the sticker price, when you plan anything financial.
Listing your game is not selling it
This is the single most common and most expensive misunderstanding. Putting a game on Steam does not put it in front of players. Steam surfaces games that already show momentum, so a launch with no accumulated audience tends to be invisible from day one and stays that way.
What actually generates sales is the wishlist base you built in the months before release. On launch day a share of those wishlists convert into purchases, that concentrated spike registers as momentum with the store, and the store then shows your game to people who never heard of it. No spike, no second wave.
Price it so the sale is worth making
Selling more copies at a price that does not sustain you is not a win. Anchor your price to your content length and your genre, sanity check it against genuinely comparable games, and set thoughtful regional prices instead of raw currency conversion so the game is affordable where purchasing power is lower.
Remember that it is far easier to lower a price than to raise one. Launching at a price you are comfortable with long term, paired with a modest launch discount, is usually safer than starting low and trying to climb.
The launch window does most of the work
Indie sales are front loaded. The first days after release decide how much algorithmic visibility the game earns, and that visibility determines how many players discover it over the following months. This is why the marketing work happens before launch, not after: by the time you release, the outcome is largely already set by the audience you gathered.
Treat launch week as a campaign. Have your press and creator outreach already landed, your demo already played, and your community already expecting the date.
Life after launch: discounts and the long tail
A launch is the beginning of the revenue curve, not the end. Steam runs recurring seasonal sales, and participating in them with a sensible discount is how many indie games earn more in the years after launch than in their launch month. Each sale event puts the game back in front of a new wave of buyers, and the wishlists you never converted are exactly who those events reach.
Where MarketYourIndie fits
Selling a game well is a business problem with numbers behind it: how many wishlists you have and how fast they are growing, what price maximizes revenue, what your take-home actually is after fees, and which discount to run when. MarketYourIndie tracks all of it in one dashboard so the decisions are grounded in your data instead of guesses.
How to start selling your indie game
- Choose your storefront. Decide where the game will sell. For most premium PC games that means Steam, optionally alongside itch.io for demos and direct sales.
- Set up Steamworks and pay the Steam Direct fee. Create your Steamworks account, complete the tax and payment paperwork, and pay the recoupable Steam Direct fee for the title.
- Publish your store page early. Get a Coming Soon page approved as early as possible so it can start collecting wishlists while you finish the game.
- Build wishlists before launch. Run a steady content cadence, ship a demo, and use a Steam Next Fest so you launch with an audience instead of into silence.
- Set your price and regional pricing. Pick a base price from your content and genre, then set regional prices and model your net revenue after fees and taxes.
- Launch with a campaign. Land press and creator coverage, run a modest launch discount, and concentrate activity in the first days to earn store visibility.
- Keep selling after launch. Join Steam seasonal sales with sensible discounts to reach the wishlists that did not convert and extend the revenue tail.