Every indie dev has an opinion about where to launch. Steam first, always. Console is a nice-to-have once you’re profitable. Epic Games Store isn’t worth the trouble. Some of that used to be true. Less of it is true now.
We spend our days on certification and release readiness, not marketing, so we’re not here to tell you how to sell more copies. But where indie games actually move units has shifted enough in 2026 that it’s worth rethinking which certifications are worth chasing, and in what order.
Steam still wins, but it’s not the whole picture
Steam remains the default first platform for most indie titles, and the numbers back that up. Indie games pulled in an estimated $4.4 billion on Steam in 2025, roughly a quarter of the platform’s total revenue, and that segment has grown at a 22% compound annual rate since 2018, nearly three times the pace of AA and AAA titles on the same platform, according to Alinea Analytics’ 2025 year-in-review.
That number comes with a real catch. The market is brutally concentrated. Of the 20,000-plus games released this year, only around 300 crossed $1 million in revenue, and the median release grossed $249 before Valve’s cut, $174 after. Steam being the default doesn’t mean Steam is easy. It means it’s still where the audience is.
The part that’s shifted is what happens after Steam. Epic Games Store used to be the one everyone wrote off, a long tail of negligible revenue propped up by free-game giveaways. That’s no longer a safe assumption. On the other hand, indies have made real money on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch for over a decade. The complication there isn’t whether the audience exists, it’s that you can’t reach it without getting through certification first.
Epic Games Store isn’t a ghost town anymore
Epic Games Store spent its first few years fighting a reputation problem. Free games drove install numbers that never translated into a real paying audience. The 2026 numbers tell a different story. Third-party titles on the store generated $400 million in player spending in 2025, up 57% year over year, with 2.78 billion hours of third-party playtime. The store also crossed 78 million monthly active users.
Epic backed that growth with terms that matter to a small studio’s math. Developers now keep 100% of net revenue on the first $1 million per product per year, with a flat 12% cut after that. For a studio launching its first or second title, that’s the difference between EGS being a rounding error and being a genuine revenue line.
None of this means EGS beats Steam on raw volume. It doesn’t, and won’t for a while. But “not worth the integration work” is a harder argument to make than it was two years ago.
Console demand didn’t wait for you to be ready
Nintendo Switch 2 has sold nearly 24 million units as of mid-2026, on top of the 156 million lifetime Switch 1 install base still buying games. Nintendo has kept running dedicated Indie World showcases through the year, specifically spotlighting smaller teams rather than treating indie titles as filler between first-party announcements.
That’s a real audience, actively looking for games to fill the gap between first-party releases. We don’t have a clean indie-specific revenue number for Switch the way we do for Steam and Epic Games Store, and we’re not going to invent one. The install base is real and growing, though, and Nintendo keeps building dedicated shelf space for smaller studios. That’s not something a platform holder does for an audience it doesn’t expect to spend.
The catch is that none of this demand is available to you until you’re certified. Console doesn’t have a soft-launch option the way Steam Early Access does. You either pass cert and you’re in the store, or you’re not there at all.
The actual bottleneck is readiness, not opportunity
When devs debate “which platform is worth it,” they usually collapse two separate problems into one question. Demand is one problem. Readiness is the other. Most studios only ever solve for the first.
You can spend months validating that your game would sell well on Nintendo Switch 2 or through Epic Games Store self-publishing. That research doesn’t get you a single sale if your build fails TRC (Tech Requirements Checklist) review, your age rating isn’t in place, or your save data implementation doesn’t meet platform standards. A first-time PlayStation certification run, for comparison, typically takes 5 to 10 weeks from a feature-complete build to a live store listing, and that window already assumes one resubmission cycle, which is common, not a worst case. We see this constantly. A game with a real audience waiting, stalled for weeks because certification wasn’t planned into the schedule.
The platforms have made the sales case for showing up. They haven’t made certification any easier. If anything, expanding to more platforms multiplies the number of separate requirement sets you need to track at once.
How to sequence it without overcommitting
You don’t need to certify for everywhere at once, and trying to usually backfires. A practical order:
- Ship where you already know the process. If Steam is your first release, get that right before adding platform complexity.
- Pick the second platform based on genre fit, not hype. A cozy sim probably has a stronger Nintendo Switch audience than a twin-stick shooter does. Let the game decide, not the headline numbers.
- Budget certification time separately from development time. A first-time console cert run commonly takes 5 to 10 weeks end to end, and that already includes one resubmission cycle. Plan backward from your launch date, not forward from when the build feels done.
- Treat Epic Games Store self-publishing as its own checklist. The revenue terms are better than they used to be, but self-publishing means you’re handling compliance and store setup yourself, similar work to what you already do on Steam, just on a platform you’re less familiar with.
- Don’t add a platform you can’t support post-launch. Patches, compliance updates, and seasonal content all need to go through certification again. More platforms means more of that overhead, indefinitely.
Run through that list once, and it’s manageable. Run it across three platforms at the same time with no one dedicated to the certification side, and it’s usually where launches slip, not in the code. That’s the gap studios call us about first.
What this means for your next release
The sales data supports spreading beyond Steam more than it used to. That’s a genuine shift, not hype. But it doesn’t change the fact that certification is still the gate every platform puts between you and that audience, and it’s a gate that punishes studios who treat it as an afterthought.
If you’re weighing whether Nintendo Switch 2 or Epic Games Store self-publishing makes sense for your next release, and want a clearer picture of what the certification timeline and requirements actually look like before you commit, reach out. That’s the part we actually do.
Sales and revenue figures reflect Epic’s official 2025 year-in-review results and Alinea Analytics’ 2025 Steam market data, verified 2026-08-17. Switch hardware figures reflect VGChartz/Rectify Gaming tracking as of June 2026. Certification timeline reflects GWG’s own PlayStation certification guide.