This is the counterpart to Diary #45 – How Much Does an Iron Village Cost to Make?, let’s talk about how much money Iron Village has brought in, and then do the obvious comparison with how much has been spent. Don’t worry, more Iron Village 1.1 content is coming soon – because most of the content is done! Since the day job has been getting a bit crazy recently (in more ways than one), progress has been sporadic, and I’ve avoided giving any release dates. That trend will continue (I’m still avoiding release dates), but my bug and feature tracking list is quite a bit shorter than when I started – the end of this update is in sight!
A preview of the Fortress (work in progress), the last major piece of “content” going into 1.1.
So, revenue – how does Iron Village make money? Overwhelmingly, it’s on Steam. Iron Village is also for sale on Itch.io, but that has accounted for $48.95 USD of gross revenue – low enough that I’m ignoring it for these calculations. If you’re curious about that breakdown though, I have Itch’s share set to 10%, and the available balance to withdraw is $30.19, so there’s an additional 28.3% that has been taken out. I don’t have all the numbers in available to me at the moment, but I suspect most of that is VAT, along with payment processing charges.
The way the payments work is Lunar Chippy Games LLC’s portion of the sales is paid on a monthly basis, so at the end of the month the previous month’s share is paid. I’ll be going through each month’s data so far, to give a picture of how things went over time.
March 2025
Iron Village was released on Steam on March 24th, 2025, at 9am EDT (13:00 UTC), so this “month” was actually just under 8 days. (I don’t know exactly what time zone Valve uses to make the month cutoff.) For the first 7 days, it was in the City Builder & Colony Sim Fest, and on sale for 15% off.
To start, the price of games varies significantly around the world, so combined with the 15% off, the gross average price was $5.68 USD, compared to a full price of $7.99 in the US and a $6.79 US sale price. There were 583 units sold (i.e. purchases of Iron Village), of which 45 (7.7%) were returned, leading to 538 net sales.
In USD, this was a gross sales of $3648.35, which you might recognize as being about the same as the expenses. Except, now we get to start taking parts away. The returns subtract $271.09, then remove $338.43 of sales tax and VAT, and the net sales are $3038.83. The cherry on top is the $100 “Steam Direct Fee”: remember how we had to pay $100 to get on Steam? Well, Iron Village sold enough to get that back, for a total of $3138.83. Great!
Except, the payment arrives at the end of April, and it’s… $2227.17. Up until then, I was wondering when Valve’s 30% cut was going to show up. I checked the math, it’s basically as close as you can get to 30% without slicing up pennies. The expenses at the time were $4046.39 (some more PR purchasing post-launch), leading to a company profit of… -$1819.22. (Note that I’m comparing to expenses at the end of April, and not when the payment was actually made to the bank account.)
April 2025
Moving onto April, Lunar Chippy Games LLC hasn’t been paid yet, but the monthly report for April has been generated, so let’s look at the numbers. An average price of $7.27 this time, with 368 units sold, but 37 returns (10.1%), so a net 331 sales. Yes, that is less in one month than the 538 in less than 8 days in March. That’s the power of festival & launch visibility combined with sales.
Subtract out returns, VAT, other taxes, and that’s $2401.56. Based on the math from March, I’m expecting a $1681.09 payment to Lunar Chippy Games LLC. Expenses at the end of April were up to $4387.57, so that’s an expected profit of… -$479.31. Still negative, but a lot closer to breaking even!
May 2025 (Through the 24th)
This data is a bit rougher, since the month isn’t over yet: there will probably be more purchases in the remaining week, as well as returns. However, so far there have been 63 net units sold, and $449.17 net sales. That would make Lunar Chippy’s expected share $314.42. Except there were a bunch more fun expenses, the largest of which were translations for version 1.1 and the LLC renewal cost. (Technically it’s called an “annual report”, but it’s the same $500 + $20 expedited filing fee.).
Adding all of that up, the current profit is… -$1615.50. Lol.
Anyway, I’ll be putting Iron Village on sale again once version 1.1 releases, as well as making more of an effort at marketing, and that LLC fee is only once a year. I still think we’re on the road to profitability, which was my baseline goal at the start (fully knowing that that’s a surprisingly difficult target). Obviously every game is different, and I’m only one data point, but I hope this was an interesting view into the Lunar Chippy budget.