Stephen Brenish
Planning to make a game? One of the most common mistakes new indie developers make is underestimating the budget. Not just the obvious costs, such as programmer time and art, but the ones that quietly eat your runway: store fees, console hardware and certification QA, audio licensing, marketing, and schedules that routinely run longer than planned.
This calculator exists to give you a reality check before you quit your day job or ask friends to work for equity promises.
Why most indie budget estimates are wrong
Game postmortems are full of developers who ran out of money months before launch. The cause is usually a combination of scope creep, underestimated hours and costs that seemed small until they weren’t. Development hardware, an extra round of QA for certification, contract testers, a music license pack: none of these is huge on its own, but together they can add thousands of dollars to a project that was already tight.
The 20% contingency in this calculator is a floor, not a target. Teams shipping their first game, or working in an engine that is new to them, should plan for more. Plenty of games shipped late and over budget and still found an audience; the ones that failed entirely often ran out of money before they could ship at all.
What the calculator covers
The estimator accounts for developer labor (or the opportunity cost if you are working for equity), store and platform fees, an allowance for console costs, software and tools per team member, audio licensing if you do not have a composer on the team, and marketing at three levels of ambition. It also shows the break-even unit count at a $14.99 price, a useful gut-check on whether your scope fits the audience you can realistically reach.
The assumptions behind the numbers
Every input is a planning assumption, not a quote. Here is what the calculator uses, so you can adjust for your own situation.
| Item | What the calculator assumes |
|---|---|
| Hours per person | The midpoint of each scope’s range, at about 150 working hours a month: roughly 90 hours for a jam game, 675 for a small game, 1,800 for a mid-size game and 3,600 for a large one. Multiplied by your headcount. |
| Steam | The $100 Steam Direct fee per game, which Valve returns once the game earns $1,000 in adjusted gross revenue. |
| iOS and Android | Apple’s Developer Program at $99 a year and Google Play’s one-time $25 registration. |
| Consoles | An allowance you set per platform (default $2,500) for development hardware, extra certification QA and ratings. Platform holders share their actual terms with registered developers. |
| Tools | About $30 per person for each month of development. |
| Audio | $4,000 for licensed music and sound effects if nobody on the team does audio. |
| Marketing | $1,250 flat for minimal, 12.5% of development cost for standard, 25% for aggressive. |
| Equity mode | Opportunity cost valued at $75 an hour. |
Reading your results
The break-even number assumes a $14.99 Steam price, Valve’s standard 30% revenue share and an allowance of about 8% for refunds. It ignores sales tax, regional pricing and discounts, so treat it as a lower bound. If break-even requires 50,000 units and your wishlists are sitting at 2,000, that is a signal to reduce scope or invest more in marketing before launch. The Steam wishlist calculator shows what your wishlists are likely to convert to.
Consoles change the picture quickly. Beyond the allowance above, each console release needs its own certification pass, often a porting partner, and time in the schedule for resubmission if the build fails. For solo developers and very small teams, a PC-first release keeps both cost and timeline down, and console versions can follow once the game has proven itself. The console certification checklist covers what platform holders test.
Team size and the hours problem
Hours are where budgets go wrong first. A two-person team on a mid-size game in this model is about 3,600 hours of work. If the team works part-time, the hours stay the same but the calendar stretches, and every extra month adds living costs that never appear on a development budget.
That is also why the calculator shows opportunity cost in equity mode. It is not a check you will write, but it is a real economic cost, and it should shape decisions about taking freelance work, seeking a publisher deal, or cutting scope to ship sooner. For a deeper method, see how to estimate game development costs, and if you are looking for funding, the game development grants database.