Steam Workshop devs making up to $500k a year

Developers using Steam Workshop are making up to as much as $500,000 a year from the service, Gabe Newell has claimed.

Speaking to The Verge, the Valve CEO said user-generated content was becoming increasingly important to the studio’s thinking, with some devs making more money building content for the Workshop than they earned from their day job.

Steam Workshop allows the community to make and design items for sale in some games on Steam Workshop, with 22 titles including Portal 2, Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 compatible with the service.

Newell explained that it appeared the notion of a game being simply just that was going away, and that titles were becoming part of a much larger experience.

He added that the workshop needs to span multiple games, connecting various titles together.

“We’re in this strange world where we have people who are using the Steam workshop who are making $500,000 per year building items for other customers,” said Newell.

“In other words, there’s this notion that user-generated content has to be an important part of our thinking. We know of other game developers making more money building content for the workshop than what they get in their day job. One of the things we found is that this notion of a workshop needs to span multiple games.

“If we’re connecting Skyrim and other games… it’s like this notion that there’s just a game seems to be going away; games are starting to look like an instance of some larger experience.”