I make games and this literally happened to me this morning

For context: I make indie games and have released two so far and I'm currently working on the third one which is weird as fuck. So the way that Steam works is, they don't send you money anytime you make a sale, but they send all of it at the end of every month. Now September is almost over and I got an e-mail titled "Steam Payment Notification" and I get all hyped up. I open it and read it that the Payment Notification is actually that there is no Payment since I didn't make $100 in sales. Way to hype me up and bring me down, Steam.
- Youtube and twitch work this same way. When I was starting there were months where I didnt make any money because I didn't meet the minimum. Hoping next month meets the requirement for you boss 🙏
  
  Does the balance at least accumulate until you do hit the threshold, or is the money just gone?
- Does Steam take a cut for distribution?
  If not, while this emotionally sucks, they've a solid operational policy.
  
  Yes, their cut is 30% which is a lot, but they are pretty much the only big platform out there. Epic games has been trying to get in the game but so far they are not close. Their cut is 15%.
- I see you settled on a design for the toaster. Love the mustache.
  
  Thank you : )
- Other games include "be a rock" and "pizza synthwave" and this is the weird one.
  Wish listed.
- You raised my hopes, and dashed them quite expertly sir! Bravo!
- Since i'm a sucker for weird games and very bad at following simple rules i wishlisted your new game lol
- Ayy I remember that toaster! This looks great! The sign with "Do not bite yourself to check whether you are a cake" got me smiling good
- Oooh, I remember seeing you post about the toaster
- Whats the game? :)

I released a game like three years ago and it's earned $97 in that time.
I feel your pain
- Buy it yourself, get over 100, cash out
  
  Haha, I've considered it. I'd really like to at least be able to buy pizza for the gang who helped make the game.
- Whats the game? :)
- Tell us the game now.
  
  Concord
- If you roughly convert your hourly salary, how much money did you spend working on this game?
  
  If we were to compare it to our day jobs, the opportunity cost for the team and me would probably be around ten grand.
  If we compare the time spent to the money earned, then we're each worth several cents an hour.
  It's a good thing I didn't get into game dev for the money, it seems I'm quite bad at it

I'm sure if you owed them 100 bucks they'd demand it
- *$99
  
  Perhaps that's a $99 discount on the next amount owed?
- Fairly certain I've bought a game that was like 34 cents or something. I definitely charged me the 34 cents.

Hey me too! I released my first game on Steam a month ago and by all objective measures it was a flop, but as a hobbyist I'm still proud of it. It honestly did better than I thought for a small niche game that I did a terrible job of marketing, and my one review so far was quite positive so I'll count that as a small win as I move onwards to the next game.
EDIT: Here's the game because my reply is getting harder to spot below - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2792160/SnowDown/ - It's a small Jackbox-inspired party game (using phones as controllers) but with real-time action and physics as you throw snowballs around and destroy structures.
- you cant just SAY that and then not mention the game name
  wow you really are bad at marketing
  
  The eternal conflict between being an indie dev and not wanting to be a shill :'(
  
  This IS the game.
  
  Oof, though you're not wrong!
- By the way, here's the game for anyone interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2792160/SnowDown/
  I didn't expect to see so many replies!
  
  This is super cute! If I buy these now for my friends and family but set it to deliver the gift near Christmas, would you get the money now? Or not til Christmas?
  This looks perfect for when everyone is over on Christmas eve! <3
  
  Got it on follow, if I ever get a house with a better Internet connection I'll give it a shot and leave a review
  
  this is unexpected, i was expecting a COD type game but instead it has penguins and you're supposed to have friends
  
  As someone who is also awkwardly treading the line between being a soulless hack and trying to get my work noticed by literally anyone: please edit your top comment with a link to your game.
  I mean it. I can't even muster the courage to post my renders to Instagram without feeling like some desperate influencer goof.
  
  Reminds me of some of the old school flash multiplayer games
- Considering you're a hobbyist and probably don't have marketing, it's too soon to say it's a flop. Many games like that pop off later once it gets seen.
  
  I appreciate the optimism! I hope it can find an audience over time, but it's definitely tough to stand out. For now, I'm aiming to just keep making games and improving, rather than giving up after the first try, which sadly seems to happen a lot out there.
  
  Rarely happens. The vast majority of game on Steam make the bulk of their sales within a few months of release.
- What's your game? Niche games are awesome. And if you made it with Godot I'm definitely interested.
  
  Here's my game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2792160/SnowDown/
  It's a little action party game you can play with phones as controllers (similar to how you'd host a Jackbox game). And yes I did make it with Godot!

I have lots of bills that are less than that every month, and yet somehow I can't just say they're not worth paying...
- I am guessing you dont have service providers from all over the globe with international transaction fees
  
  If I did I'd probably have lots of little satellite offices in various regions to make that easier.

My bank: "We have a new valuation on your home! Open your app to see it!"
...
"It's down 2%!"
- hah same energy

If you want to support me, a wishlist of my current game will mean the world to me: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2336120/Do_Not_Press_The_Button_To_Delete_The_Multiverse/
But please don't spend money on my previous games, I recognize that they aren't that good I don't want to burden anyone financially with them (I loved every minute of making them, but I was still a noob back then).
- FYI you have a typo in your last screenshot (This sign m[a]y not...):
  
  Arhgh missed that! Thank you so much!
- But please don't spend money on my previous games, I recognize that they aren't that good I don't want to burden anyone financially with them (I loved every minute of making them, but I was still a noob back then).
  You're not my mum! I bought Be a Rock anyway. Keep going, make games!
  I believe in you!
- I will advertise this to my friends, they have lots of young people in their circles that go through games at a good pace. This looks right up their alley.
  
  WOW! Thank you so much! Word of mouth is important for small indie dev teams
- You know what? Fuck you.
  Buys "Be A Rock"
- Would you mind explaining how wishlisting a game helps the devs? Is it an algorithm thing? Will it be shown to more people when it is being wishlisted more?
  
  yeah pretty much, if a ton of people wishlist a game it pops up more on the front pages of categories bc that means it's rlly popular
- The screenshots sell it well. That's some funny stuff. I'll check out the demo.
  
  Thank you :)
- Does Wishlisting a game help the developer in anyway other than indicating excitement for a game?
  I’d love to know if there an any incentive to interacting with a game’s store page other than buying a game, obviously.
  If Steam gives a bonus for that kind of thing, I’m going to be a lot more generous with my clicks.
  
  It definitely helps. Every dev I've heard talking about releasing a game stresses wishlisting. I forget why, unfortunately. It might make it more noticable, sort of like likensub on YouTube.
  I do know that refunding a game is the absolute worst thing you can do to it.
- One of my friends has your game wishlisted. That's one more than I expected to see based on your post, so shoutouts to you for exceeding expectations! Hope you keep making better and better games. :)
- I love that the Lemmy workshopped toaster has made it to the Steam page already.
  Wish listed!
- Wish listed! Also bought Be a Rock, I look forward to being a rock later tonight, it sounds fantastic!
- Funnily I saw the playthrough of your game in YouTube and it really looks like a labour of love. As the guy who did the playthrough suggested, still need to buy it as a thank you.
  Or is that another game with a red button? The maker of the game I'm thinking about wrote a comment on YouTube

I guess I shouldn't be expected to pay for games until my total is over a hundred bucks then?
- No you pay a financial service provider who pays Steam in bulk once a month. So yes same principle applies.
  
  shouldn't those service providers wait until the total is $100 before they started to receive my money due to cost associated to sending and receiving money then?
- Bruh, don't give them ideas for the next price hike!

I've had Google charge me $0.01 before for firebase usage.
They really should have waited until I owed more since that cost them money.
- On my personal AWS account, Im paying them 0.17 cents a month.
  I wonder if they pay a fee since it's hooked into my credit card.
  
  0.17 cents
  So is that less than a cent or is it 17 cents? If it's the former, I don't think it's even possible to make a transaction that small.
  
  They're bigger so it's hard to know, but it's usually something like 2.9% + 10c a transaction.
  At their scale though who knows
- Once a month I'd have to pay a few pennies to Google for our cloud use at a school district I worked for. It always baffled me!
- They should almost just make it so the blaze plan of firebase or other cloud services has a $1 non refundable pre-payment so they can just whittle away at the pennies instead of getting charged processing/transaction fees on a $0.01 transaction. Tops up to $1 if it goes to $0
  I think people would pay $1 to enable the paid plans. If you're going that far, you're getting $1 of use out of it.

itch.io once sent me 4$

If a game gets lost in the steam store and no one ever plays it, was it ever a game at all?
- Nope just someone's crushed hopes and dreams at that point lol

I feel you, on Twitch is 50$.
- How do people make money there?
  
  I can't even begin to understand how hard it is to make it on Twitch. I assume probably the top 1000 streamers make the real money and the rest 99,5% probably make like $50 per month...
  
  They don't. Their payouts leaked a couple years ago, of the thousands of streamers there's a few hundred that make minimum wage or better. This pattern holds true for YouTube, only fans, etc.
  
  subscribers and something called bits of which i dont know the purpose.

They don't seem to have an issue sending $10 refunds to my bank account, I wonder how much it actually costs them
- Complete guess here, but refunds are probably handled differently by the banks compared to new payments, i.e. undoing an error is probably free(ish), but paying people is how they get you
- Especially when they're making bank charging 30%.
- The bigger cost is probably the processing time, limiting to $100 probably drops the number of payments by 80%.

I used to make mobile apps as a hobby and I still get the weekly report of my dwindling numbers.
- How do you get into this? Could you DM me the info and perhaps a good starting place? I can't work right now due to an injury and I'd love to look into this
  
  My experience is with iPhone (yeah yeah boo Apple).
  Most of how I learned was just digging through Apple’s documentation, focusing on one goal at a time. How do I draw stuff to the screen? How do I handle touch inputs? How do I use the built in UI elements? How do I play sounds? How do I get GPS data? Things like that. I’d usually have an idea of a specific mini-project that would make use of a specific new tool.
  Note that I already had some programming experience (although it wasn’t much) before I started teaching myself this way.
  Here’s Apple’s website: https://developer.apple.com/develop/
  Just start by downloading XCode and playing with one of their sample projects. SpriteKit is particularly easy to get started with and there’s a sample project for it. (I’m assuming you want to make something like a game. If you want to make more of a utility app, look up SwiftUI).
  If you aren’t an ~~iPhone user~~ “Apple fanboy”, you can try this: https://developer.android.com/courses
  Also many game engines (e.g. Godot, Unreal, ~~Unity~~) have support for both iOS and Android.

Do they just keep your earning in your account until one month your total outstanding earnings breach the 100$ threshold and you'll receive all your earning in one transaction or does this money get swallowed by steam?
- I think they keep your money until reach the threshold. Steam aren't scummy so I'm pretty sure there is no shady stuff going on with your money.
  
  Yeah i was about to ask that. If they just took all amounts below 100 for themselves that would be super fucked up and probably illegal.

I've been waiting like 20 years for my money from NewGrounds. I was at $80 last time I checked a while ago.

Happens to me almost every month. Good thing I didn't quit my day job.
- Out of curiosity, have you had some big pay days? Or just enough to treat yourself?
  
  I don't think I ever got more than $200 in a month. But I keep the money in a separate account and only use it for game dev or business stuff.

Seen your meme during my lunch break doom scrolling on another site. Happy to see you are here on lemmy too!

Policy schmolicy. Withholding even one cent you are owed is fucking shitty.
- This sort of thing is pretty common in various industries, they let the money accumulate until it reaches a threshold.
  
  Common doesn't mean not shitty
- Costs more than a cent to male the transaction
  
  What if they female it? It should cost 0.7 cents.
  
  That's their problem

My experience every month.

Jesus. This makes it reasonable to just buy $100 worth of your own game every month, just to make sure. Assuming that the number of real sales cover Valve's percentage and then some. Yeah, that's a non-zero opportunity cost for you, and additional float for Valve, however petty it may be. But for a small developer, maybe that makes sense.
- You'd lose 30% on every self-sale. I can't see how the numbers would work out
- The break even point would be at a balance of 23.08$. However, if the account balance doesn't expire, buying your own game to put you over the threshold would be checking the couch cushions for loose change level of desperation.
  
  Oh, it's petty cash to be sure. If you have $100-ish bucks to throw around, you probably aren't going to miss much by not doing this. Unless, of course, letting someone else take even one dollar from you in this way is against your religion or something (i.e. the principle of the thing). Conversely, if you need the handful of dollars this makes, you probably don't have that kind of walking-around money in the first place.

~~if this is true I'd recommend sending GamersNexus an email with the details as they might be able to help considering their past actions to hold companies accountable~~
Edit:
Steam policy rip, see comments down below
- It's true, but it's Steam policy. If you haven't reached the threshold for the month, you are not getting a payment. I guess I just have to sell more games and do better next time. I mean with Steam Sale events I will probably get there eventually.
  
  It's true, but it's Steam policy. If you haven't reached the threshold for the month, you are not getting a payment.
  damn, guess that's just how it is if you want to sell games on Steam I guess then :/

don't make shitty asset flips then