Where Can a Solo Developer Sell a Casual Game, and for How Much? Steam, Microsoft Store and Google Play Fees and Sales in 2026

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Games with simple rules that you can finish a round of in a few minutes are usually called “casual games”: puzzles, falling-block games, brick breakers, solitaire. Many of them are small enough for one person to build from start to finish.

Here is the short answer. You can sell a Windows version on Steam or the Microsoft Store and an Android version on Google Play. Getting onto a store costs at most $100 per game, on Steam. But half of the games released on Steam never reach $1,100–$1,700 in gross revenue. Whether a game sells is largely decided before it is finished. This article walks through the store fees as of October 2026 and what games actually earn on each store.

Steam or the Microsoft Store for Windows, Google Play for Android

Steam is a store for PCs (Windows, Mac, Linux) and the Steam Deck handheld. It does not sell Android games, so the phone version needs its own Google Play listing. If you build with an engine such as Unity or Godot, one project can export both a Windows build and an Android build.

Steam: the biggest store for PC games. The fee is $100 per game, and you get it back from a later payout once that game earns $1,000.
Microsoft Store: the store built into Windows. Since September 2025, registration has been free for individual developers. You verify your identity with a government ID and a selfie.
Google Play: the Android store. Registration is a one-time $25.
itch.io: a storefront for indie games. Signing up is free, and you choose what share of each sale goes to the site. The trade-off is that it brings in far fewer buyers on its own.

Store fees as of October 2026

The share each store keeps varies a lot.

Steam: 30%. It drops to 25% once a game passes $10 million in revenue, which rarely matters for a solo project.
Microsoft Store: 12% for PC games, a rate cut from 30% in August 2021. Microsoft’s 2025 announcement of free registration only mentions “low revenue share rates,” so check the current rate in Partner Center before you publish.
Google Play: a new fee structure started in 2026 (next section).

On Steam, what reaches you after the 30% cut, refunds and lower regional prices is closer to 45–50% of the list price. That is a safe number to plan with.

Google Play changed its fees in 2026

After Google settled its court fight with Epic Games, Google Play switched to a new fee structure on June 30, 2026 in the US, the UK and the European Economic Area. Australia and Japan followed on September 30, 2026, and the rest of the world is scheduled to follow by September 2027.

The fee is now split in two: a service fee, and a 5% billing fee that applies when the purchase goes through Google Play’s own billing.

The first $1 million of annual earnings: 10% service fee + 5% billing fee
Earnings above $1 million: 20% + 5% for users who installed after the change, 25% + 5% for earlier users
Auto-renewing subscriptions: 10% + 5%

For a solo developer, that means roughly 15% in total on a paid app or an in-app purchase. In the regions on the new structure, developers can also use their own billing or link out to a website, but those routes still carry a service fee, so for a small game Google Play’s own billing is the simplest choice.

There is one more hurdle. Personal developer accounts created after November 13, 2023 must run a closed test with at least 12 testers, opted in for 14 days in a row, before the game can go live. A tester who drops out starts the 14 days over, so it helps to line up friends and family in advance.

How much do games actually sell?

Start with Steam. All of these figures are estimates from outside firms, and they vary with the method.

About 20,000 games launched on Steam in 2025, and only around 300 of them passed $1 million in revenue (Alinea Analytics).
The median revenue of games released in 2026 was $1,728 (through September 1).
The median lifetime revenue of games released in 2019 was $1,136.
48.7% of 2025 releases had fewer than 10 reviews at the end of the year. Ten reviews corresponds to roughly 300 copies sold.

In other words, half of the games on Steam stall at a few hundred copies.

On Android, casual games are mostly free and earn from ads. In February–April 2026, casual and hyper-casual games (even simpler, often one-tap games) each took 40% of mobile game ad revenue across 19 countries, according to Sensor Tower. Casual games are the center of the ad-funded market. I could not find reliable recent figures for how much a single solo developer’s game earns from ads, though. Ad revenue comes in as people play, so it stays small until a game reaches tens of thousands of downloads.

What each store’s track record looks like

Here is the size of each store, along with games that sold and games that didn’t.

Steam

Games on Steam grossed an estimated $16.9–17.7 billion in 2025, and indie games made up about a quarter of that. According to Valve, 5,863 games earned more than $100,000 on Steam in 2025. The concurrent-user record passed 42 million in January 2026.

Patrick’s Parabox, a puzzle game made by one developer (released in 2022 at $19.99), has sold an estimated 94,000 copies for about $1.1 million. At the other end, a solo developer in Japan reported that a store page shown 150,000 times sold just 16 copies in the first 48 hours. Competition is heavy too: about 2,000 new puzzle games come out on Steam each year.

Microsoft Store

Microsoft says the store had more than 250 million monthly active users as of May 2025. It does not publish total game revenue. Microsoft has quoted an independent developer whose daily new installs grew tenfold in a year, but that was an app, not a game. I found no public track record of a solo casual game selling well on the Microsoft Store.

Google Play

Users spent an estimated $49.2 billion on Google Play in 2025, and games were downloaded about 36.2 billion times. Mobile puzzle games earned $8.2 billion, up 7.6% from the year before (AppMagic).

The most downloaded game in Japan during the summer holidays (August 8–16, 2026) was Meowdoku!, a puzzle released only that May (Sensor Tower). Its rules are a simple cross between sudoku and Minesweeper, and it is free with ads. It comes from a game company in Singapore, not a solo developer.

Simple games with added progression and in-app purchases, known as “hybrid-casual,” are also on the rise. In the same February–April 2026 data, hybrid games took 16% of ad revenue. More games now pair ads with purchases instead of relying on ads alone.

Setting a price

Steam: $2–5 is a reasonable range for a simple casual game. One Steam pricing guide lists “simple puzzle games or arcade-style games” in the $4.99 tier. VG Insights puts the median price of paid games that sold at least 1,000 copies at $10, with $2–4 as the budget band. Price with half-off sales in mind.
Android: free with ads is the norm, often combined with a paid “remove ads” option or in-game items. A game that charges up front tends to go untried.

Sell on Steam at $4.99, keep about half, and you net around $2.50 a copy. Three hundred copies comes to about $750.

Sales are decided before launch

On Steam, the number of wishlists a game collects before launch largely decides how it sells. The median game sells about 27% of its wishlist count in the first month. Launch with a few hundred wishlists and you can expect dozens of sales, perhaps a hundred or so.

Sign up for Steamworks and pay the $100 fee. Tax and identity checks take 15–30 days, and Steam requires at least 30 days between paying the fee and releasing.
Put up a “Coming Soon” store page early. It must be public for at least two weeks before launch.
Release a demo and join Steam Next Fest, the demo festival that runs several times a year.
Share your progress on a blog or social media while you build.
For Android, register on Google Play and finish the closed test (12 testers for 14 days) before applying for production.

If you want to see how people react without spending money, you can release on the Microsoft Store or itch.io first, since both are free to join.

Because casual games are simple, they are also easy to copy, and AI tools now make close clones quick to produce. Even with simple rules, a distinct look and feel helps a game stand out.

Taxes

Stores collect tax information during sign-up. Steam asks you to complete a tax interview before you can be paid. If you live outside the US, you submit a W-8BEN as an individual; without it, 30% can be withheld from your US-source earnings, and a tax treaty between your country and the US may lower that rate. How the income is treated at home depends on your country, so check with your local tax office or an accountant.

Summary

A solo developer can sell a casual game on Steam or the Microsoft Store for Windows and on Google Play for Android. Steam takes 30%, the Microsoft Store takes 12% on PC games, and Google Play’s new structure works out to roughly 15% at a solo developer’s scale. Half of the new games on Steam sell only a few hundred copies, so it is realistic to treat a first game as a way to earn a few hundred dollars and learn how to ship. If you want more sales, put up your store page while you are still building and start collecting wishlists.

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