CD Projekt’s excellent open-world RPG won’t stop selling – especially not with the absurd Witcher 3 player counts that the Netflix series has driven. Now, the company has announced that the game has brought in $50 million in revenue on Steam since October 1, 2018 – and while that may seem like an arbitrary milestone, it’s actually very significant.
October 2018 is the cutoff for Valve’s sliding revenue share tiers. The standard split with developers is 30% for Valve and 70% for the devs, but that shifts to 25% / 75% when a game makes $10 million, and 20% / 80% when a game makes $50 million. The new split applies to future revenue, so now CD Projekt gets to keep 80% of revenue from now on – which are likely to continue strongly, with the continued popularity of the Netflix show.
Steam’s revenue share changes in 2018 came in the wake of the Epic Games Store and its 12% share of revenue – developers there get 88% of the revenue, no matter how much money their game has made.
Of course, if you want to support CD Projekt in the biggest way possible you should be buying from GOG, where the company gets 100% of the revenue. The company has occasionally encouraged players to do just that, and early Cyberpunk 2077 pre-order numbers have suggested some success from the goodwill campaign.
The accumulated revenue from sales of The Witcher 3 on @Steam platform for the period of time between October 1st 2018 and today has exceeded 50M USD. As a result, we are now getting 80% on any subsequent sales of TW3 on Steam.
Thank you all for your support! pic.twitter.com/JgNgrrI5h0— CD PROJEKT IR (@CDPROJEKTRED_IR) February 20, 2020
If you already own the game, check out the best Witcher 3 mods for an excuse to play it all over again.