TL;DR in the image you see in blue the values that we can calculate from the provided data next to the results that my calculator put out. The only thing which is slightly off is VAT and this is because we can only use exact sales numbers of 4 countries and everything else is averaged. Also some countries have VAT rates above 22% which is the highest my calculator uses and if sales bias toward those countries then the results are obviously different.

I showed this calculator before but people fighted it. Yet it is rock solid for what it does and I put hours and days into it validating the numbers. The error is just about 3% and I want to proof it today. Here is the link: http://steamcalculator.nubosoft.de/

It is all meant to be a reliable tool for indie dev expectations that plan to make a living out of game dev or need reliable values for their bank, business plan or publisher.

The downside is though that sales numbers and sales ratios can not be predicted, but you can estimate for example:

• Revenue of likely minimal sales
• Revenue of high/above average sales
• Sales required to reach break even
• Revenue if 20% of players buy your new DLC
• Will translating into chinese be worth it?
• What If only 10% of wishlists convert?

Errors or questions?

I had a mistake with withholding taxes but it has been fixed as it only applies to US income. Now I can't see anything that would be wrong but please point out any issues. Obviously we do not consider the Steam Share drop to 25%, you can do that manually.

I'd also be interested in feedback on the default discount ratios.
Also helpful is if this tool due to its many paramets is just hard to use, that one I get.

Share and Help

I work with facts and put some lifetime into this thing. Too many peole have simply no idea about taxes and percentages and mix up numbers all the time and that is ok. But it does not help those who seek an answer, so I ask you to bookmark and share this post or tool. This is especially true because things change. Steam payout ratios from 10 years ago don't matter anymore, taxing and currencies changed a lot.

Proof and exaplanation

Thankfully the developer of TangyTD released his sales numbers recently. Not only revenue but also units sold in the top 10 countries. They are from May and so I took all that I could and used these numbers in my calculator. I even choose the release weeks average exchange rates of every currency involved. Also the game was sold with a flat 12% discount in that time which I considered.

First we got gross price per unit, that is simply gross sales $245,123 divided by steam units 28,078 = $8,73.

The net revenue of $197,847 is what Steam takes their 30% share which is $59,354. *In fact devs also get back their $100 Steam direct fee if net revenue crosses $1,000.

This leaves the developer with a payout of $138,492. Here we need to deduct banking fees which we do not know exactly, but let it be a few hundred dollars. We are already very close to what my tool predicts calculates, which is $138,258.

But let's go to the details.

We know that we got 10,3% return rate so we can estimate a return revenue of $25,247. This is an estimation because we do not know which countries those returns came from, but they should average out most of the time.

We can calculate net price per unit by dividing net revenue by net units (25,186) and that is about $7,86, just 3 cents off from my tool.

This diference is VAT and we can get it as well. First we need "true" gross revenue by removing the refunds from gross revenue, which is $219,875. "True", because refunds are not really sales. We need net-sales gross-revenue.

If we subtract net revenue from that value we get $22,028 which is the estimated VAT that was actually paid and transfered by Steam.

So the average VAT percentage is 10,02%.

We can double check that by comparing gross and net unit prices: 1 - ($7,86 / $8,73) = 9,97%. Here is a minimal error due to decimal loss.

So my tool is off by 3 cents of VAT per unit. And that is like I said the uncertainty of localized sales which we can only average close enough. Another uncertainty is simply estimated refund rate and which prices the dev has choosen for each country. My tool uses the default table from SteamDB for each price region. If we knew the exact refunded revenue we could even be closer to the truth.

Saw these logo posts recently where people either were scammed by AI artists or had to spend more than $20 to get a decent logo.

As we have just done our first logo for an upcoming convention, I thought that I want to share my regular process. We did this in one day, many sketches and versions.

 EDIT: Thanks for the feedback, but I got to clarify a few things:

- I could not do this without the artist, I used his CITY and Punk font he drew as a base. Just compare our pencil sketches!
- This post is about process and collaboration**.** It shows how I came to what I had in mind (left) with his help (right).
- His refined version is just the first vector translation that he did at the end of day. He could go on.
- Price of the artist is kinda relative, we got a sort of flatrate. It includes many variations not shown here.
- Artist is not a pure logo artist, he is an alrounder doing concept art, 3D models etc.
- I am glad that we work together and that I found someone who is capable of many things.

Post

Often I think that we see art as a regular task like cleaning dishes, putting up a painting on the wall or even install some electronics. I pay you X, give me Y. But that is not how it works. Art and creative work is not measurable and heavily relies on intrinsic factors.

My personal issue is that I often know what I want and I also got some basic artistic training. But I cannot get onto paper what I see in my head and not skilled enough to make fine artwork, especially in reasonable time.

My artist is, he is capable in many ways and he is fast! But from working with skilled artists for a while now I often see that they seem to lack a few specific things. It can be lighting, it can be proportions, readability, composition, contrast etc. Art leads have a place in the industry for a reason and artists thrive with good creative leads. Alone, they may not perform the same.
*Could also be the complete opposite if the situation is bad, I look at the ideal scenario here.

I don't claim to know everything of course, but what I see I note and we work it out. This process worked for me for a decade now and every artist I worked with liked it. And that is the point, it is a process. I work with artists live on discord, back and forth chatting. Not via a kanban board or daily email.

There might be this thing that you do not want your customers to fool around if they have no clue. But if they are your partner on eye level then you get so much better results.

This shouldn’t become too philosophical. All I wanted to say is, team up. See your artists as partners, not delivery people. If you have a clear vision then try to show and describe it.

If you do or cannot, then well you must take what you get. May hire an art director as well.
It is not the artist’s fault not being able to read your mind.

Our logo is not final yet, but it as great first version! I am of cours also open to critique on the Logo and what I wrote above. What are your experiences and processes in a creative team?