Despite having nearly its entire back catalog on Steam, Suda51's studio doesn't benefit much from sales of its old games: 'It's really nice for the other people who are making bank off that, though'

Suda51 posing in front of a TV showing Romeo Is a Dead Man — (Image credit: Future)

Despite a reputation for making cult games, Japanese director Suda51's studio Grasshopper Manufacture has survived for 27 years—long enough to have now ported much of its back catalog of console games to PC. A look at the difference between Grasshopper's developer listing page on Steam and its publisher listing page, though, reveals a too-common struggle for game studios that can't afford to finance their own games: they also don't benefit from the long tail of sales.

"For most of the games that we have up on Steam, we're not the publisher for them. We just made them," said Suda51 in a recent interview. "We do have a bunch of games on Steam—it looks like some of them are doing pretty well. Continuously well, even. Unfortunately we don't make very much money off the Steam sales. Other people are making plenty of money off sales from Steam, but we're not making the kind of money off of Steam to say 'hey, let's make a big-ass game like [Romeo Is a Dead Man]. It's really nice for the other people who are making bank off that, though."

"We thought, okay, well, how hard can it be? So we decided to self-publish and realized how hard it can be," he said. "There's lots of stuff publishers do for you: all kinds of stuff that we didn't know, stuff we didn't know how to find out about, so it's been a real challenge. But it's been a good experience. We've learned a lot. It's been harder than working with a publisher, but at the same time, on top of learning a lot, self-publishing means that you make more money in the end, because you don't have to give a big chunk to somebody else. It's hard to say which is the best or most ideal situation, but at least for now, I'm glad that we're doing Romeo on our own."

Considering China-based NetEase has divested from or shut down a string of its international studios over the past year, I hope for Grasshopper's sake that Romeo Is a Dead Man is a hit—and that it's around long enough to finally benefit from the steady stream of cash that seasonal Steam sales can bring in.

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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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