The 2024 Indie Game Landscape: Why Luck Plays a Major Role in Success on Steam

Discover how a small percentage of indie games dominate the revenue, and why even great games can struggle in a saturated market.

In 2024, a staggering 18,000 new games were released on Steam. For context, that’s 10,000 more than in 2019. As I ranted in my previous post, game development has been commodified beyond recognition, now resembling the cutthroat economics of — brace yourself — toilet paper. But just how much has the landscape shifted? How much luck do you need to survive in this flood of digital debris? To answer that, I’ve crunched some numbers and taken a hard look at the revenue of indie games released last year.

If you’re a professional game developer, the question that effects the longevity of your career is probably: “How do I make a financially successful game?” Some of the more fortunate game developers— who have actually managed to do just that — offer a deceptively simple answer: “Just make a good game.” To which I respond with the obvious: there are thousands of new games released every year, and only a fraction make any real money. This is usually met with a smug rebuttal: “Well, most of those are just buggy asset flips.”

Without a doubt, Steam’s new releases include their fair share of unplayables— games that aren’t fun, aren’t polished, and look (or sound) like they were cobbled together by developers who were either not trying or didn’t know how to do any better. But here’s the real question: how many of the games that failed financially actually belong to that category? Are they all just buggy messes, or are genuinely well-made games sinking into obscurity too? And more importantly, can we put a number on it? Because if we can measure it, we can stop fooling ourselves.

For this analysis, I’ll be diving into SteamDB and running a series of scripts I’ve written to sift through the chaos. All the scripts, along with the data I’ve gathered using the Steam API, are available on my GitHub, you’re more than welcome to run the analysis yourself: https://github.com/IRCSS/SteamAPI-Game-Revenue-analyzer/tree/main

First, let’s narrow our focus to indie games (more on why later). Filtering for that, we get roughly 12,000 indie releases on Steam in 2024 — still an overwhelming number. Now, let’s refine it further. Suppose we only look at games with at least 50 reviews. Using a 50x multiplier (a rough but widely accepted estimate), that suggests around 2,500 players have given the game a shot. Next, we add another filter: at least 85 positive reviews. This should help weed out the shovelware and asset flips. After all, if reviews are even remotely representative of player sentiment, that means at least 2,000 people thought this game was worth recommending. That should give us a solid starting point.

That still leaves us with 500 indie games — each one vying for attention, just like yours!

You might think, “Well, indies usually thrive in niche markets, so why lump all indie games together?” Fair point. Let’s refine our search further. Suppose we focus on a specific niche — say, games tagged as both relaxing and puzzle, while still meeting our previous conditions. Surely, that should narrow things down, right?

Nope. That still leaves you with 65 games.

That’s 65 direct competitors, all fighting for the attention of the same pool of players. And here’s the real kicker: the average Steam user plays 4–5 games a year. That’s it. So now the question isn’t just “Is my game good?” but “How are those few purchases distributed across all these options?” Because if you’re banking on “just make a good game” to cut through this competition, I’ve got news for you — so is everyone else.

Before diving into the numbers, let’s raise the bar even higher. If we filter for:

• At least 200 reviews (suggesting at least 10,000 players)
• 90% or higher positive ratings
• Premium indie games (no free-to-play sneaking in)

…we’re left with 108 games. A much more manageable number to analyze.

That means these are proper games — games that had a certain sense of quality or uniqueness to them that so many people fell in love with. If our rough estimates hold, 9,000 players (out of 10,000) would actively recommend them. Now that we’ve carved out this not asset flip group, let’s see how these releases are distributed.

For anyone who wants to play along at home, here’s a CSV file with all the AppIDs of these 108 games: https://github.com/IRCSS/SteamAPI-Game-Revenue-analyzer/blob/main/2024%20top%20Releases.csv

Using the Steam API and a simple Python script, we can pull key data for each of these games — price, release date, number of reviews — and estimate their revenue.

For revenue estimation, I’m applying the standard 50x multiplier (i.e., total sales = 50 × number of reviews). It’s not perfect, but it’s a reasonable approximation based on industry benchmarks. This gives us a dataset that offers a big-picture view of how well these successful indie games performed.

Here’s the resulting table with all the data: https://github.com/IRCSS/SteamAPI-Game-Revenue-analyzer/blob/main/game_data_output.csv

Now, let’s sort the list by revenue and take a closer look at the distribution. This will show us just how unevenly success is spread among even the best-performing indie games.

If history (and every other creative industry) is any indication, we should expect a steep drop-off — a handful of breakout hits at the top, followed by a long tail of games making significantly less. But let’s not just assume — let’s visualize it.

Here’s a graph of the revenue distribution:

The real question now is: What does this shape tell us about your chances of success? Let’s analyze.

The first thing that jumps out when you look at the revenue distribution is that it’s far from linear. The growth isn’t gradual or steady; rather, it’s more like a winner-takes-all scenario. This means that the top 100 indie games released in 2024 follow a distribution that’s not Gaussian — it’s definitely not normal.

In fact, it looks like a small number of games are reaping the majority of the rewards. So, to answer the earlier question of how those 5 average purchases per year are distributed across these titles: it’s not evenly spread.

In fact, most of the profit seems to be concentrated in a few standout titles. This is classic Pareto distribution or Power Law at work. To put some numbers to it, 8.33% of these top 100 games account for a staggering 80% of the total revenue made. And keep in mind, these 100 games are already filtered down to those that would be considered somewhat successful by any measure. If we were to expand this calculation to include the full 12,000 indie releases, it’s safe to say that under 0.5% of the games would likely account for 80% of the total money made in the market. A sobering thought for anyone entering the race.

You might think we should ignore outliers like Palworld and Satisfactory — after all, they’re statistical anomalies. Should we? Absolutely not. The idea that we can simply dismiss outliers comes from the Gaussian distribution, which assumes that events so many standard deviations away from the mean are so rare they happen once in a billion. But in an exponential distribution like this, outliers don’t just happen — they regularly pop up. In fact, they are the cornerstones of pop culture. These type of outliers are the very face of the game industry. When Balatro came out, everyone was playing it. If you released a card game at the same time? Good luck. So these games define the landscape upon which you earn your money.

But as an exercise, let’s ignore the top 2 games for now. Here’s the graph you get:

The distribution looks a bit better, with 17.92% of the games accounting for 80% of the total revenue. However, this is still an exponential distribution. Let’s push this even further and ignore the top 10 earning games.

Now, 29.59% of the games account for 80% of the total revenue. Still an exponent. Still an ecosystem where luck plays a massive role.

This reveals something fascinating about distributions like these: their fractal nature. As you zoom in and out of the dataset, the same relationships persist. For example, let’s focus on just the top 20% of the dataset. What do we get?

From the top 20%, 25% of the games account for 80% of the total revenue! Still exponent. Same relationship.

Just looking at these graphs, it’s hard to draw any strong conclusions about financial success. After all, financial success isn’t just about how much revenue a game brings in — it’s about what’s left over after you subtract the costs of making it. So, let’s make two adjustments to our graph:

First, we’ll apply a log scale to the Y-axis (which effectively flattens the exponent). This is important because it eliminates the visual discrepancy between the top earners and the low earners, allowing us to actually compare both on the same graph.

Second, we’ll draw a line at 1 million in revenue — but more on that in a second.

58 out of 108 games (53.70%) made more than $1,000,000 in revenue. At first glance, this number looks pretty impressive — what a market to be in! But hold on, this is 53% of the loved games we’ve filtered out. When you consider the total pool of 12,000 indie games, only 0.5% of them actually made over a million dollars. As a reference, 30% of games on Meta Quest were making more than a million dollars before they opened the store.

Why choose a million as a reference point? Well, making a million on Steam means your company will see around $700k in the bank after Steam’s cut. For a small indie team, to pay yourself, you might decide to pay corporate tax (which typically hovers around 20%, depending on the country), plus a tax on capital gains (also around 20%, give or take). If you’re a larger team, you might pay salaries, which come with their own set of social security contributions and income taxes.

So, while making a million might sound like a lot, it’s really only enough to hire a couple of people at $50k a year for one year. And here’s the kicker: if you launch a game and break even, you’re not looking at a sustainable business model. You’d need at least a 2x to 3x return to cushion against future releases where you might make zero revenue.

That means only around 0.5% of indie games released in 2024 can even begin to be financially viable. Of course, I’m simplifying here. If you release on other platforms, your IP could perform as well as it does on Steam. Companies also sell merchandise and DLCs, which can boost the performance of the base game. And, if you’re a solo developer who made an indie game in 5 months, then $1 million is an amazing financial success.

But here’s the key point: from the 99.5% of games that don’t hit that mark, many of them still fail despite having made a “good game”. This brings us back to the idea that success in this market isn’t just about the quality of the game — it’s about a lot of other factors.

How does this relate to luck? If you look at the top-performing games, you’ll find some truly amazing products! Take Hades, for example. It’s a fantastic game, and there’s no doubt it’s one of a kind. It’s completely conceivable that the game sitting at position N might be twice as fun as the game sitting at position N×2. But here’s the thing: the difference in quality alone can’t explain why the former made — let me check — 500 times more money!

People love certainty, so we start obsessing over finding the factor that causes that difference in success, often focusing on things we can control. Whether it’s the cover design, Steam page copy, influencer outreach, social media strategy, and so on, we think there must be some key to unlock success.

Here’s a bonus graph: I took the release dates of the games and plotted them over time. Who knows? Maybe we can find a correlation and discover the magical release time that makes an indie game successful.

Looking at this, the only takeaway I can gather is that maybe releasing in July, November or December might not be the best idea. This could be due to the typical release schedules of larger AAA games or various cultural events. But even that is a strong maybe.

Take January, for instance. In countries with strong consumer cultures, after big shopping events like Christmas (think Boxing Day, Black Friday, or whatever new bullshit Amazon comes up with next), there’s usually a slump in consumer spending. One might reasonably think that January would be a terrible time to release a game. Yet, Palworld — the best-performing indie game of last year — was released during this very month!

I’m not saying you shouldn’t make a good game, or try to design an awesome cover, or even optimize your release date. But even if you do all of that, there’s still a huge assortment of contributing factors that are completely beyond your control. And all of that? It falls under the umbrella of luck!

When we released Puzzling Places, Shuhei Yoshida, the former President of Sony Worldwide Studios, played and liked our game. His vocal support opened up opportunities for us to get amazing support from Sony and gave us valuable publicity. But what series of events led to Mr. Yoshida playing and liking our game? And how many other games never found a foothold because a series of unrelated events simply didn’t happen?

When we released Superflight, I distinctly remember the strange feeling of seeing the game on the first page of Steam. How did it get there? For those in the know, an hour on the front page of Steam is worth a lot! But would it have made it there if we released the game a week earlier or a week later? I don’t know. What I do know is that these are events that were completely out of my control.

And this leads us to games like NAIAD, an indie game released in 2024:

Some interesting stuff about NAIAD. It’s clearly not a buggy asset flip. The game is polished, looks amazing, and was made by someone who obviously both cares and knows how to create something visually stunning. NAIAD didn’t mess up its store page (everything is on point), and it didn’t fail to advertise the game either — it does amazing on social media. Yet, despite all of that, NAIAD didn’t even make it into our analysis of the top 108 games. Why? Because while the game is loved by those who play it, it simply wasn’t played by enough people to pass our filter!

You might point out that walking simulators — light on gameplay — are hard sells on Steam, but I think you can easily think of examples that did insanely well despite that.

How about Paper Trail — another beautiful game that didn’t even make it onto our list? The gameplay reminds me somewhat of Gorogoa and Storyteller, both of which performed orders of magnitude better.

The fact that two games of this level of quality didn’t even pass our filter should tell you just how many gems we’re not even putting on our graph!

One last point before I wrap things up: I decided to focus on indie games, but if you add publisher-backed games into the mix, not much will change. Adding revenues from Fortnite and Roblox would make games like Palworld disappear in the same way Palworld dominates the rest. A small percentage of games account for the majority of the revenue made!

Conclusion

Last year saw some beautiful games being released — more than ever before. Some found success, and some not as much. Looking at how that distribution shaped up, the top 8 percent of games accounted for 80 percent of the revenue. This is a landscape where making a good game is not enough. A lot depends on luck. So, what can you do with this information?

If you’re making a game, you can’t just wait around for luck to strike. It’s not that you can’t make a Balatro or that your team can’t create a Palworld. Heck, given the exponential nature of the distribution, there’s a real chance we might see an indie game earn a billion dollars in the next few years, just on Steam alone! And yes, that could be your game. But you can hardly count on that!

What you can do is relax a bit. Focus on the parts you can control and work on managing the risks tied to things you can’t. If you’re making an indie game, you’re betting that you won’t be one of the ones that doesn’t make it. And as I’ve shown here, even if you’re a professional who can make a good game, the chance of not making it is quite large. Whether it’s saving, building a safety net, applying for grants, securing funding, or working with a publisher, make sure you’re well-positioned to take a risk of this size.

Thanks for reading, as usual, you can follow me on all socials under: https://ircss.github.io/