How do you earn money on Steam & Co? Indie publisher Thunderful Games explains it in the podcast.
link to Podcast Content
Just selling a game – that sounds like a concept from yesterday. Today we’re talking about service games, in-game shops complete with microtransactions, and more recently, even selling NFTs à la Ubisoft Quartz.
Is it no longer enough to launch a game to make money with it? Micha talks about this in the podcast with two industry insiders:
- Dieter Schoeller founded the Europe publisher Headup Games in 2009 and, after Headup was taken over by the Swedish Thunderful Group, is responsible for all game projects there as Vice President of Publishing.
- Julian Broich was responsible for finances as Sales Manager at Headup Games and now, as Head of Sales at Thunderful Games, has even more insight into sales on Steam & Co.
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Dieter and Julian mainly work in the indie sector, as Thunderful Games acts as a publisher for games such as Curious Expedition 2, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, SteamWorld Headhunter or Lost in Random.
Among other things, we talk about the importance of Steam and other digital sales platforms, which have made it much easier to publish a game simultaneously worldwide compared to traditional retail stores. Of course also on the important Chinese market, which accounts for half of the sales in the indie segment.
For Dieter and Julian, however, Steam is also a double-edged sword. When something goes wrong at release — a game has technical problems, for example, or a country complains about a bad translation — there can be a chain reaction of bad user reviews from which it’s hard to recover.
We also discuss the importance of sales, the sense and nonsense of DLCs and the sale of soundtracks or collector’s editions. Thunderful Games can’t do without additional goodies either.
