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."
