For many independent game developers, Valve Corp.’s Steam Store is the most important sales market on PC by far, and thanks to programs like Steam Greenlight and Steam Early Access, which make it easier for developers to get their games in front of consumers, the platform’s prominence in indie gaming has only gotten bigger.

While Steam may not be the only game in town, it is certainly the biggest and, potentially, the most lucrative. It can be easy to assume that a failure to make it onto Steam would spell doom for an indie developer, but Big Pharma creator Tim Wicksteed says that he believes indie developers can still make a successful game without having to rely on the approval of Valve.

Wicksteed outlined the sales cycle of Big Pharma in a recent blog post, and while the game’s Steam launch represented a significant spike in revenue, Wicksteed says that the game was already successful before that.

“OK, I don’t think Valve/Steam are going to be too worried,” Wicksteed admitted, “but [Big Pharma’s sales graph] does demonstrate that it’s possible to do a successful launch independently of Steam.

“Just before the Steam launch we had a ROI of a little over 2. That was great. It wasn’t enough for me to fully-fund my next game yet, but even without the Steam launch, I believe the trickle income provided by the game probably would have gotten me there eventually.”

While Wicksteed is not advising indie developers to forgo Steam, he encourages them to consider the non-Steam market as an important source of revenue, saying, “… while a storefront provides an array of useful features (I love the way Steam handles updates for example), it’s not a 1-stop-shop to selling your game. You can, and indeed need, to market independently too.”

Wicksteed explained that he spent a significant amount of time one self-promotion by posting development videos, attending events, doing interviews, and so on, all of which he believes contributed to the game’s initial success. He also noted that he paid “for a truckload of Facebook and Twitter ads.”

Screenshot courtesy of Twice Circled
Sales graph via Tim Wicksteed | Gamasutra