Game dev from the inside
The road to a million-dollar Steam hit, with real numbers
Evgeny Grishakov's articles on making, marketing and earning money with games: releases, wishlists, sales and lessons from the inside.
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How Much Do Mobile Games Make: Ads, Purchases and Our Own Numbers
Most mobile games make almost nothing: in 2025, games outside the top 1% shared 7.5% of in-app revenue. I break down where a mobile game's income comes from, what the stores take, when paid installs pay off and what our games made, from $86 a quarter to thousands of dollars a month.
How Much Does Steam Take From Game Sales, and What the Developer Keeps
Valve takes 30% of a game sale, but counts it after VAT and refunds, and may then withhold US tax on top. Step by step, I show how much of Meltopia's $456,945 Steam revenue reaches us and how to estimate the payout for your own game.
How to See How Much a Game Made on Steam, and How Wrong the Estimate Is
You can't see the exact revenue of someone else's Steam game from the outside, but you can estimate it from reviews. We break down the formula and the tools, and test the method on Meltopia, whose real gross we know.
How to Make a Game with AI: What It Already Does and Where It Breaks
AI can already build a prototype of a small game almost by itself, if you use an agent like Claude Code and a genre built on logic and math. I go through my own prototypes: which games work, where AI breaks, what it costs and whether you can sell the result.
How to Make Your Own Game from Scratch: Stages, Engine, Team and Timeline
Where to start your first PC game, what the development stages are, which engine to pick, whether you can do it alone and without coding, and how long it takes. From my own experience: six failed games before the first profitable one, three tries on Steam before Meltopia, and two ways of working, a small game and a dream game.
How Much Do Indie Games Make on Steam, and How Many Break Even
The typical paid Steam game earns about $1,000, while a handful of hits pull the average up. We break down data on 1,230 games released in January 2026, revenue thresholds, break-even odds and what the games that earn have in common.