Indie dev discovers game grossed $245,000

Tangy TD, a frantic tower defense indie, brought an unguarded moment of joy when developer Cakez opened his Steam report and saw a gross revenue figure of $245,000. A clip of him and his partner celebrating an earlier milestone — about $32,000 in the first 30 hours on sale — went viral and helped draw more attention to the release.

The initial livestream glimpse of the Steam backend showed 3,676 copies sold for $31,942, while the later report put total sales at 28,171 copies with 2,892 refunded. The game’s all-time peak simultaneous players sits at 795, with a recent peak of 462; modest concurrent numbers for a solo project translate here into substantial earnings.

The episode also highlights how close SteamDB’s public sales estimates can be: Tangy TD landed roughly in the middle of its three estimated figures. After Valve’s 30 percent cut the developer’s take falls to $138,492, which, spread over the four years spent making the game, works out to about $34,600 a year.

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