Just received my first payment from Steam: Gross revenue VS. what I actually receive + other infos

Hello everyone,

So my first game launched on Steam this October 10th, and I thought it might be interesting to share the current results after I received my first payment from Steam. Please note that I am french, live in France, which will have quite an important impact on the net revenue. Of course, I don't know if I'll be precise enough, so if you have any question, ask me anything!

UNITS SOLD

From 10/10/24 to 31/10/24, I sold 1252 units. I had 12,146 wishlists at launch and there was a 20% launch discount, which is quite interesting because most of the time there's an average 10% wishlist conversion rate for the first month. 52 people asked for a refund and I can't know the reason, whether they liked it or not, maybe their laptops couldn't run the game? I have no idea but I expected this to happen too and it is not too much compared to the actual number of units sold in my opinion. The reception of the game is currently very positive so far so I am not too worried and don't take that personally.

GROSS/NET REVENUE

Without the chargeback/returns, I got a total of $18,766.54 . Add the chargeback/returns, and the tax/sales Tax collected, there's now $16,727.10, then there's the US Revenue share and we have $11,739.

In the end, with the conversion from dollars to euros, plus the exchange rate from my bank I actually received 11.027€. Now, as a self-employed person, I will have to declare this revenue and they will take something like 11% to 22%, which I'm still unsure about (remember this is my first time doing all this), so the actual net revenue will probably be something like 9814€.

CONCLUSION

In the end if I'm not mistaken I lost around 47.5% of my gross revenue, which is... quite a lot, but I kind of expected that. Next month will be far less interesting, but I'm curious to see how well the next major content updates and the sales/discounts will perform.

What I find interesting is that since launch I got +3,834 wishlist additions, so I guess people are waiting for the moment it will be on sales?

And that's it for now. I hope it will help people knowing how much you can expect and how much you actually keep from the gross revenues, when my game was about to release I was very curious about the other side once your game is actually launched so I hope it helped some people somehow!