How to 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.

Two costs matter. First, the Steam Direct Fee: 100 USD or the local equivalent for each new app you want to distribute³. It is not refundable, but it is recoupable in the payment made after the product reaches at least $1,000 Adjusted Gross Revenue, and the recoupment appears as its own line item in your monthly report³. Treat it as a deposit rather than a pure expense, and note that VAT, GST or similar consumption taxes may be charged on the fee itself³.

Second, Steam takes a revenue share on every sale. Valve does not publish the percentage in its open documentation, because the split is set by the Steam Distribution Agreement you sign, so check your own agreement rather than trusting a number you read somewhere. What is documented is how it is applied: your monthly report takes gross revenue, subtracts applicable adjustments such as returns, chargebacks and taxes to reach net revenue, and multiplies that by the revenue share to produce what you are paid⁴. The practical point: model your take-home, not the sticker price, when you plan anything financial.

This is the single most common and most expensive misunderstanding. Steam does give every release a floor: your game enters the New Releases queue, and the system prioritises the titles with the least views since release, which Valve describes as a baseline of views against which to measure customer interest⁵. That baseline is a test, not an audience.

What the test measures is whether people buy and play. Valve names that as the strong signal that there is interest and that Steam should show the game to more players⁵. So 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 is what the store reads, and the store then shows your game to people who never heard of it. No spike, no second wave.

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 raising a price later is expensive on Steam: a product cannot be discounted for 30 days following a price increase in any currency, and the documentation states there are no exceptions to that rule⁶. Launching at a price you are comfortable with long term, paired with a launch discount configured before release, is safer than starting low and trying to climb.

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.

A launch is the beginning of the revenue curve, not the end. Steam runs recurring seasonal sales, and they are the one discount type with no 30 day cooldown, both their own and other discounts, so they are the easiest events to build a calendar around⁶. 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.

To reach them the discount has to qualify for the notification. Steam emails or pushes to wishlisters for any discount of 20% or more, provided it runs longer than 8 hours and applies to the lowest priced package for the game rather than only a deluxe edition⁷. A 15% sale is a fine business decision, it just does not ring anyone.

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.