Do I need this figured out for my first game?

You need awareness more than mastery. First projects are for learning, but money and rights decisions are the ones that follow you, so know the basics before signing or spending anything significant.

Where does bug reporting fit into this?

Quietly underneath all of it. Whatever you ship — store page, jam build, full release — players will hit problems you can't reproduce, and most won't tell you. A lightweight reporting tool like Bugnet captures those crashes and reports with the context to fix them, which protects the reviews and momentum everything above depends on.

Epic Games Store vs Steam for Indie Devs

Quick answer: Epic takes 12% to Steam's 30%, but Steam's discovery systems, review ecosystem, and indie-buying audience generate the demand that a better split multiplies — 88% of Epic-scale sales rarely beats 70% of Steam-scale sales for small games. Launch Steam-first by default; add Epic when it's cheap to do or they offer real incentives.

Epic takes 12% to Steam's 30%, but Steam's discovery systems, review ecosystem, and indie-buying audience generate the demand that a better split multiplies — 88% of Epic-scale sales rarely beats 70% of Steam-scale sales for small games. Launch Steam-first by default; add Epic when it's cheap to do or they offer real incentives. That's the short version — the sections below get into the how, the why, and the mistakes worth dodging.

The split is the headline; traffic is the story

Epic's 12% cut is genuinely better arithmetic per unit. The catch is units: Epic's storefront has historically offered far weaker organic discovery for small titles — fewer browse surfaces, no user reviews driving conversion, an audience trained to visit for free weekly games and big exclusives rather than indie spelunking.

Steam's machine — wishlists, queues, tags, reviews, festivals — manufactures demand for unknown games. That manufacturing is what an indie is actually buying with the 30%.

When Epic makes clear sense

Three honest cases: Epic approaches you with money (exclusivity deals or Epic First Run-style programs have funded many indies — take the call seriously); your engine is Unreal (Epic waives its engine royalty on EGS sales, sweetening the math); or the port cost is trivial and you're adding shelf space post-Steam-launch with zero expectations.

Free-game promotions deserve their own note: devs who've done them report enormous claim counts, valuable follow-on attention, and negotiated payments that can exceed realistic sales — worth evaluating for a back-catalog title.

The boring multi-store reality

Each storefront is recurring overhead: builds, page upkeep, patch parity, separate achievements, separate communities asking why their version lags. For a tiny team, a neglected store presence quietly damages more than its revenue adds.

Sequence by capacity: Steam first, then the cheap adjacents (itch, GOG if accepted, EGS) as bandwidth allows, each with a maintenance plan or not at all.

Cheap experiments beat expensive certainty

Most business questions in indie development — price, platform, publisher, marketing spend — can be tested small before they're answered big. A two-week itch.io experiment, one festival demo, or a single contractor invoice teaches you more than a month of forum threads about what other people's games did.

Treat every irreversible decision with suspicion and every reversible one with speed. The studios that survive aren't the ones that guessed right the first time; they're the ones that made their guesses cheap.

Protect the downside first

Indie game revenue is lumpy and unpredictable, and most advice quietly assumes a hit. Plan for the median outcome instead: a launch that earns modestly and grows slowly. Keep fixed costs low, keep some runway, and make deals you could live with if the game sells a tenth of your hopes.

None of this is pessimism — it's what lets you take real creative risks. A developer who can afford to miss is a developer who can afford to be interesting.

Plan for the bugs you won't see coming

Whatever else you take from this, build yourself a way to hear about problems. Once your game is on other people's machines, most failures happen out of sight: the crash on hardware you don't own, the save that corrupts once in fifty exits, the bug players mention in a review instead of a report.

A lightweight crash and bug reporting setup — even just Bugnet's free tier wired into your engine — turns that silence into a fixable list. The devs who look calm at launch aren't luckier; they just see their problems earlier.

Putting it to work

Don't try to act on all of this at once. Pick the one change that costs you the least and pays the most this week, do it, and see what actually happens before reaching for the next.

Most of this rewards steadiness over intensity. A small improvement made every week, checked against how real players respond, outruns any single burst of effort — in this corner of game development and every other one.

Make the guesses cheap, the agreements written, and the runway longer than the plan.