Grasshopper Manufacture sees little benefit from Steam sales, Suda51 says

Grasshopper Manufacture has survived for 27 years and has ported much of its back catalog to PC. A look at the difference between the studio's developer page on Steam and its publisher page highlights a common problem for teams that cannot afford to publish their own work: they often don't benefit from the long tail of sales.

"For most of the games that we have up on Steam, we're not the publisher for them. We just made them," said Suda51 in a recent interview. "We do have a bunch of games on Steam—it looks like some of them are doing pretty well. Continuously well, even. Unfortunately we don't make very much money off the Steam sales.

Other people are making plenty of money off sales from Steam, but we're not making the kind of money off of Steam to say 'hey, let's make a big-ass game like [Romeo Is a Dead Man]. It's really nice for the other people who are making bank off that, though.'" China-based NetEase has divested from or shut down a string of its international studios over the past year.

China

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