Dev’s Games 2025 Financials Report
Another year
has come to pass, which means it’s time to update with the 2025 Dev’s Games Financials Report and show you how much money my games made (and how much I lost) this year!
Why do this?
When I first started publishing and selling my own indie games, I found it nearly impossible to find publically available data about how much money games were making at roughly my scale (one person making games by themself with zero financial backing).
Often most of the reports one would find were larger teams of a handful of people, working alongside publishers, maybe with grant funding…but nothing about people who were sort of just doing solo dev and selling their work from nothing. This made it very difficult for me starting out to get an idea of how much people in my situation were actually making or even just the types of numbers I should be expecting - which in turn made it more difficult for me to formulate action plans around my productions and what to expect when working on my games. So now that I have a few games published, I think it’s worthwhile to share this type of rough information for people who were like me and might be looking for similar reference points.
I think it’s also generally good practice to demystify financials around indie dev and just talk about crap like this!
Like honestly, there’s no reason why these types of numbers should be considered taboo to speak about or hard to find in the first place, and I think business deals end up with a negative effect of sealing people off from sharing this information altogether. Since the reality is that very few people actually make money in this industry - let alone enough to survive sustainably at any scale - we should be sharing this type of stuff all over.
Everybody feels like a failure despite the fact we’re all pretty much failing. 🥹
The Disclaimers and Preamble
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Given how volitile and unreliable indie game development is as a practice (especially financially), do not treat these numbers as a reliable metric of any kind. Treat this as just another data point you could use to compare and contrast against other data points, not any sort of exhaustive reference of what a dev of my scope and scale will necessarily make.
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Numbers will be in both Canadian Dollars and US Dollars, and marked as such. Steam figures are in USD and my business numbers are in CDN. They are also rounded, for my sanity.
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Most of these numbers will be based on Steam Sales Reports, as the greatest volume of my actual sales are done via Steam. There will be some noise due my wonderful (read: terrible) filtering of my contract profits in here too.
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I am not including Itch.io figures. This is largely because many of my games on Itch.io are distributed via Charity Bundles, so numbers of downloads vs. sales vs. views there are all over the map these days. There’s probably noise of maybe ~1-10 copies of games total that are via Itch.io per year in addition to this, but my games are incredibly low-volume over there in terms of actual sales, so I consider it a negligible amount in the scheme of things.
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There is no Owner’s Draw from these profits; my working policy around my self-publishing is that all the money made from my games goes back into making my games. I only draw from these in the event of an unforeseen financial emergency (which fortunately has yet to happen). I tend to pay contractors based on flat rates (vs. hourly/salary) and scale up my payouts if the work turns out to be more time consuming than expected, meaning I’m not expected to suddenly front payments with money I’m not positive I already have. This is also why my expenses will seem rather high in comparison to my profits, because the money made here is intended to go back into my future indie titles and not pay for any external life expenses.
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Per above, I spent the latter part of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 not working on any projects (and thus, saving money), and only midway through this year did I ramp up production on my upcoming game S.K.R.U.B. Squad. I’ve been spending very aggressively on and have a number of wonderful contractors helping me with it, but it’s easily the most I’ve spent on a project to-date and I typically operate much more lean than this; you’ll see that reflected in these numbers too.
The 2025 Dev’s Games Financial Report
Overview
Because numbers mean little without scope and context, here’s a brief overview about myself and business that is feeding into these numbers (for those who might not already know me).
Years In-Industry: 2016-Present
Years of Self Publishing Games: 2020-Present
Starting Budget on first title (in 2020): $1000 CDN
Games Published (Via Steam): 4
Gross Game Sales Profits (2025): +$5,394 CDN
Gross Expenses (2025): -$4,908 CDN
Bank Fees (Transfer fees, bank fees): $99.01 CDN
Software (Engine Plugins, Software Hosting, Assets): $1,086.01 CDN
Contractor Fees: $3,454.46 CDN
Convention Fees: $149.82 CDN
Office Supplies: $105.65 CDN
Misc. Fees: $13.73 CDN
Net Profit: +$486 CDN
Per-Game Breakdown
Bombing!!: A Graffiti Sandbox (May, 2021 - $6.99 USD)
Units
Units Sold (2025): 363 Units
Units Sold (Lifetime): 2,821 Units
2025 Profits: $1,226 USD
Average Price at Sale: $3 USD
Wishlists
Wishlists Balance (2025): 140
Wishlists (Total): 2,755
Lofty Quest (March, 2022 - $3.99 USD)
Units
Units Sold (2025): 15 Units
Units Sold (Lifetime): 142 Units
Sales
2025 Profits: $29 USD
Average Price at Sale: N/A (didn’t meet sales theshold for this info)
Wishlists
Wishlists Balance (2025): 7
Wishlists (Total): 547
Bombing!! 2: A Graffiti Paradise (June, 2023 - $19.99 USD)
Units
Units Sold (2025): 182 Units
Units Sold (Lifetime): 670 Units
Sales
2025 Profits: $2,568 USD
Average Price at Sale: $7 USD
Wishlists
Wishlists Balance (2025): -17
Wishlists (Total): 4,649
Centauri Dark (July, 2024 - $4.99 USD)
Units
Units Sold (2025): 46 Units
Units Sold (Lifetime): 90 Units
Sales
2025 Profits: $171 USD
Average Price at Sale: N/A (didn’t meet sales theshold for this info)
Wishlists
Wishlists Balance (2025): 50
Wishlists (Total): 657
S.K.R.U.B. Squad (Upcoming [November 2025 Announcement] - Unannounced Price)
Units
Units Sold (2025): N/A
Units Sold (Lifetime): N/A
Sales
2025 Profits:N/A
Average Price at Sale: N/A
Wishlists
Wishlists Balance (2025): 169
Wishlists (Total): 169
Takeaways for me
- Bombing!! 1 still sells very well, but at a low price point and often on sale at 50% off. It also has a very high refund rate (largely by achievement scammers), which doesn’t help. It sells in volume, but I don’t consider it to be a very healthy or sustainable product representative of how I want my works to be positioned.
- Bombing!! 2 continues to be the most profitable game. I think largely because I priced it high and so it sells high even when on sale. It has also been bundled with Bombing!! 1 and the Bombing!! franchise generally is my largest seller.
- Centauri Dark and Lofty Quest are duds. I already knew this was the case, but every year I check and realize yes, they don’t sell well at all. 😅 I’ve largely given up hope on ever making expenses back on those.
- SKRUB Suad’s announcement is not the worst! At 169 Wishlists since its announcement last month! This isn’t a huge number by any means, but based on me just spamming my social media, it’s sizeable enough that it gives me hope it might do well. Comparatively, one month before launch Centauri Dark had only 69 wishlists, while Lofty Quest had only 32. I’m hopeful it’ll do better than them, at least!
- I should slow spending on SKRUB Squad a bit. While I have some money from previous years in my account still, I’ve spent quite aggressively and I should dial that back so as to not overextend myself (which might be tough considering I have launch coming up but we’ll see how that goes).
I hope these
numbers give you a little bit of clarity as to what a developer of my size and situation might expect to make over the course of a year! I think all in all this was a fairly standard year for me business-wise, outside of my SKRUB Squad spending.
The early part of 2025 consisted of me recovering from burnout after struggling to ship Centauri Dark and focusing on some contracts in order to sustain myself elsewhere. Once I started to get my spark back when that wrapped up, SKRUB Squad really helped me pull myself out of that rut in the latter half of the year and focus on a project again. All in all despite a few ups and downs for myself personally, not a bad year for the ol’ indie studio of mine.
Anyway, thanks for reading! I look forward to seeing each and every one of you in the new year. 🙂
