How to Make Money Making Video Games as a Solo Dev

Yes, you can make money making video games as a solo developer, and the routes that pay first are not the ones the vendor blogs lead with. Paid copies on itch.io pay out 7 days after a sale. Steam pays 30 days after the month closes and holds the first $100. Mobile stores take a cut and charge a membership. Contract work pays before your own game does. Which route fits depends on what you already have, so this article works out the net per copy from the official pricing and payout pages I loaded today, then ranks the routes by fixed cost and time to first dollar.

My own receipt is small and I'd rather say so up front. Roughly $10,000 lifetime across everything I've shipped, and the part of that I can point at cleanly is seven digital toolkits priced $29 to $49, not a game. The first sale on that store took about two months to show up. That number is why this article has math in it.

Two Searches Hide in One Phrase

Search this phrase and half of page one is about getting paid to play games. Streaming and esports. That is a different job. If that is what you wanted, the rest of this page will not help.

The other half is two engine vendors listing revenue models with no fees attached and a Reddit thread. Neither vendor page tells you what a copy nets, what the store charges up front, or when the money lands. Those three numbers are what decide whether a route is worth your weekend.

What One $9.99 Copy Pays You

Every figure in this table comes from the store's own pricing or payout page, fetched on September 15, 2026. The pages are the Steam Direct fee page, the Steamworks payments page, the itch.io payments documentation, Apple's Small Business Program page and Google Play's service fee page. The one exception is Valve's revenue share, which is inside a distribution agreement behind a login. I could not load it from a public page, so the 30% in the Steam row is the widely reported figure and you should treat it as an assumption, not a verified fact. Epic's store terms returned a 403 on every page I tried, so Epic is left out rather than guessed.

Assumptions for the math are one copy at $9.99, no refund, no VAT, no regional pricing.

Two things jump out of that table that the vendor pages skip.

First, itch.io nets you more per copy than Steam on the same price, by about $1.41 on a $9.99 game, and pays you three to seven weeks sooner. Steam has the audience. itch.io has the margin and the speed. If you are testing whether anyone will pay for the thing at all, the itch.io release preflight is the cheaper experiment by a wide gap.

Second, the mobile stores look generous per copy and then charge you rent. Apple's $99 per year works out to about 12 copies a year at $8.49 net just to break even on membership. Google's $25 is a one-time fee, so roughly 3 copies cover it forever. That asymmetry matters more than the 15% headline.

One caveat on Google. Its fee page now describes a different structure for the EEA, UK and US starting June 30, 2026, with new installs billed at 10% plus a 5% billing fee. The combined figure for a fresh install still lands at 15%, which is why the row reads that way, but the page wording is split and you should read it yourself before quoting it to anyone.

Fixed Costs and Time to First Dollar

Rank the routes by what they demand before the first dollar arrives, and the order flips from what the listicles suggest.

The pattern I keep landing on is that the routes with zero cash cost all require an audience or a client to exist before the money does. The routes with a finished game as the only prerequisite cost $3 or $100. That is the trade. You pay in money or you pay in the months it takes to be known.

The First $1,000 on Steam, Worked Out

Steam's own page says the $100 fee is "recoupable in the payment made after your product has at least $1,000.00 USD Adjusted Gross Revenue for Steam Store and in-app purchases." At $9.99 list, before refunds and regional pricing, that is 101 copies. Adjusted gross is Valve's number, not yours, so refunds and lower regional prices push the real count higher.

Then the calendar. Valve pays "30 days after they are made, usually at the end of the month," with the example that February sales pay at the end of March. And it only pays once the prior month exceeds the $100 minimum. So a launch that sells 15 copies in the last week of a month pays out about five weeks later, and a launch that sells 9 copies waits until a month clears $100.

None of that is a reason to avoid Steam. It is a reason to treat the Steam publishing path as the second store, not the first, unless you already have the wishlists to make the launch week count.

How Free Games Still Pay

This is a People Also Ask question and the answer is short. A free game earns through ads, in-app purchases, or donations, and each of those needs a different thing from you.

Ads need installs. Nobody pays for impressions you don't have, and a solo dev's first game rarely has the volume to make a rewarded-ad placement worth the SDK integration. In-app purchases need a game with a reason to keep playing, which is a design problem before it is a monetization problem.

Donations are the one a solo dev can switch on today. itch.io's pricing page describes a "$0 or Donate" mode where any price you set is the minimum and downloaders can pay above it before they download. The same page claims that 30% of all money spent on itch.io is extra money paid above the minimum. That is itch.io's own aggregate with no date on it, so I'd read it as "tipping happens" rather than a forecast for your game.

The Withholding Mistake That Costs 30%

Here is a failure that no vendor blog mentions and that hits non-US developers specifically.

Valve's onboarding FAQ says that "most types of U.S. source income received by a foreign person are subject to a U.S. tax rate of 30%," and that a reduced rate or exemption may apply under a tax treaty. To claim the treaty rate you complete a W-8BEN, which needs either a foreign tax identification number or a US one. Skip the tax interview, or fill it in without a TIN, and $300 of every $1,000 in US-source revenue is withheld before the store share is even calculated.

The sequence that goes wrong looks like this. A developer outside the US rushes onboarding to hit a launch date, answers the tax questionnaire without the TIN, and ships. The first payment arrives lighter than the sales report suggested. The FAQ also says that retaking the interview deletes the prior one, and that a recently issued TIN can take up to 30 days to validate with the IRS. So the fix is not instant either.

Do the tax interview before you upload a build. The onboarding page says the questionnaire itself can take 2 to 7 business days to process, and it needs your legal name and a bank account in that same name. Put that week into the plan.

Selling Tools and Assets Instead of Games

The listicles mention asset sales in a sentence. I think it deserves more, because it is the route where my own receipt actually lives.

Other developers are a market with money and a specific need. A tileset, a shader, a dialogue system, a checklist, an export script. The store math is the same as a game on itch.io, 10% default plus the processor fee, and the buyer is easier to find because they are already searching for the thing by name.

Two boundaries though. The Godot Asset Library is not a store. Its submission rules require a free and open source license that matches the repository, so it is a place to be found, not a place to be paid. And an asset needs maintenance. A game you shipped can sit. A tool that breaks on the next engine release generates refund requests.

My toolkits are not game assets, they are documents and templates, but the shape of the experience carries over. First sale after about two months, priced in the $29 to $49 range, and every sale since has come from someone who was searching for the exact problem the product solves. Nobody stumbled in.

Contract Work Pays Sooner Than Your Game Will

I have no numbers for this route because rates vary by country, engine and client, and any figure I gave you would be invented. What I can say is structural.

A client pays on an invoice, not after a store's 30 day lag. The work is scoped by someone else, which forces the discipline most solo devs lack on their own projects. And the portfolio you build is the same portfolio that makes your own game's store page credible. The downside is that it eats the hours you meant to spend on your game, and it can quietly become the whole job.

If your own game is the goal, I'd treat contract work as the thing that funds the indie game budget, with a written cap on hours per week, rather than the plan itself.

Can You Make $100 a Day

People ask this, so here is the arithmetic instead of a mood.

At $6.99 net per copy on Steam, $100 a day is about 15 copies a day, every day, after the store cut and before any tax. At $8.40 on itch.io it is 12 copies a day. Sustained. For a solo dev's first or second game, that is a launch-week number, not a Tuesday-in-month-four number.

The version of this question that has an honest answer is "can a small paid game cover its own listing fee and buy the next one's art." At itch.io margins, $300 of sales pays for a lot of placeholder-replacing. That is the scale I'd plan around until a launch proves otherwise.

Pick a Route by What You Already Have

If you have a finished small game and nothing else, put it on itch.io as paid or donate-optional, pay the $3 identity fee, and learn whether anyone pays. The 7 day payout means you know within two weeks.

If you have a store page with wishlists building, Steam is where the copies are, and the wishlist guide covers the demand side this article skips. Budget the $100, do the tax interview a week early, and expect the first payment 30 to 60 days after launch.

If you have a skill other developers need, sell the tool. It will likely out-earn your first game, and I say that as someone whose receipts point exactly that way.

If you have none of those yet, the honest route is contract work or a job while the first small game gets finished. Nothing in the tables above pays for a game that does not exist, and no engine or pricing trick changes that order.