Benchmark: How much money can you make from DLC?

How well does DLC do?

Answer: It scales with your game’s performance, but for games that will earn at least $10,000+ it is probably worth doing some minor supporter-style DLC in time for the launch of your game.

If your game is on the path to making $150,000 or more, you definitely should be preparing some DLC.

Benchmark: How much can you earn from DLC:

The tiers for the rest of the article are based on the total gross revenue (pre-Steam 30% cut) of the base game (NOT including DLC). Creating DLC is a fixed cost so it becomes more valuable as your base game’s sales increase. The goal here is for you to match up your game to the benchmarks to help you determine if making some DLC is worth your time and effort.

Gross game revenue:

• 🥉Bronze Tier: $0-$10K
• 🥈Silver Tier: $10K-$149K
• 🥇Gold Tier: $150K-$999
• 💎Diamond Tier: $1Million+

Free to play: I did get a few responses from games where the base game is free and they make 100% of their money from DLC. Unfortunately I didn’t get much data from “free to play” games so the results were all over the place. So I pulled that data from this benchmark report.

Also I broke the type of DLC into major categories to see how they performed

• Expansion pack – this is new levels, biomes, puzzles, bosses, new characters. Basically new playable content that isn’t cosmetic.
• Soundtrack – the music tracks. Side note: many developers mentioned they worked out deals to split the revenue with the composer or give them 100% of the proceeds. 
• Supporter pack – this is a silly little cosmetic or doodad that doesn’t do much in game and acts as a “tip jar” where players who like you can spend a bit more to “support” you as a developer. 
• Art book – this is a pdf or ebook that has additional art and content about the making of the game. 
• Attach rate: the percentage of buyers who also buy the DLC. So if every other person who buys your game also buys the DLC, the attach rate would be 50% (DLC units / main game units)

TL;DR What is the attach rate for DLC?

Revenue Tier	Base game gross revenue(pre steam cut)	Median attach rate for all DLC types (Median revenue from all DLC)	Median Expansion pack attach rate (median revenue from this DLC type)	Median Soundtrack attach rate (median revenue from this DLC type)	Median Supporter pack attach rate (median revenue from this DLC type)	Median Art book attach rate (median revenue from this DLC type)
💎Diamond	$1,000,000+	18% ($1,069,000)	14% ($1,250,000)	2.8% ($65,900)	2.3% ($94,405)	1.62% ($44,555)
🥇Gold	$150K-$999K	3.3% ($8,600)	16.7% ($29,500)	2.84% ($3,300)	3.4% ($3,735)	8.4% ($5,876)
🥈Silver	$10K-$149K	40% ($11,639)	35.9% ($20,000)	16.88% ($2,400)	6.8% ($1,371)	No data
🥉Bronze	$1-$10K	1.5% ($80)	No data	0.12% ($105)	22% ($320)	3.72% ($83.00)

*Note I am aware of the weirdness between the Gold and Silver tier attach rates and median revenue. It’s not a typo. I will get to that in a second, don’t email me or post on Discord or Reddit complaining about it, please read the full article before commenting …

Data sources

The data for this benchmark comes from a survey I sent out to developers asking for their full data on their DLC. Here is what came back:

Study sample size:

• 52 Games 
• 83 individual DLC spread out among those 52 games.

Representative sample?

Amazingly the biggest response population was from Diamond-tier games! I even sent the survey out a second time begging developers who were in the Silver/Gold tier to try and increase the sample!

Unfortunately there were only 9 games in silver tier and 7 games in gold tier that gave me their data. Strangely a bunch of games in Silver tier had very high attach rates and the few Gold games had very low attach rates. I rechecked the numbers a dozen times and I have no idea why Silver games did so well at this tier level. I think it is just a funky statistical noise. 

Maybe Silver developers were ashamed of their underperformance so didn’t want to submit their data and the only ones who did are very proud of their overperformance? 

If you have a Silver / Gold tier game with DLC, please submit your data here.

As we will see, DLC is most benneficial for Diamond-tier games because of the enormous visibilty Valve blesses upon them. So it makes sense that most of the responders were Diamond. Developers with games that underperformed typically don’t bother making DLC, they wisely just move on to their next game.

Is there a Boxleiter number for DLC?

The Boxleiter method is the trick where you can multiply the number of steam reviews a game has by a constant (usually 30 or 40) and get a pretty good estimate of the number of copies it sold.

So if a game has 1000 reviews, it probably sold 30,000 units.

Is there a constant you can use to estimate DLC?

NO!

I looked at every earning tier, cross-referenced with every DLC type and got a range of 199 units per DLC review all the way up to 1126 units per DLC review.

There isn’t a correlation between the two numbers. You can’t really estimate DLC sales.

General DLC Advice

In the DLC survey, I asked devs if they had any advice based on their experience releasing DLC. A couple developers noted that they saw a pretty significant jump in their DLC attach rate when they made a bundle of their main game and all DLC. It makes sense: if a shopper is willing to add a couple bucks above the game’s base price, a couple dollars on top of that isn’t that big of a deal. 

I also asked developers how long it took them to make their DLC. For most Supporter packs it took no more than a week or two. Soundtracks are just uploading a bunch of mp3s and coming up with some cover art.

Expansion pack development time varied widely since it has playable content.

How common is DLC? 

So if most Gold and Diamond-tier games can earn an extra $3,735-$1,250,000 for a little cheap DLC, wouldn’t you think offering DLC would be standard procedure? 

Turns out no. 

To figure this out, I put away the individual developer survey and did a broad study into ALL the games that released in 2024. How common is DLC? Why just 2024? When this blog was written (March, 2026) we aren’t far enough away from 2025 for most games to release their DLC (most games don’t launch expansion pack DLC until a year post launch). 

So I used the VGinsights revenue estimations to see what games were in each income tier. The number of DLCs tied to each game is not provided by VGinsights so I wrote a data scraper and crawled ALL of those 2024 games (including AAA, AA, Indie). I stripped out games that were free. The result was 14,399 games. 

Here were the results:

Base game income tier	Average number of DLC	Number of games with at least 1 DLC	Number of games bundling their DLC
💎Diamond (303 games)	3.14	207 (68%)	78 (25.7%)
🥇Gold (611 games)	1.28	289 (47%)	115 (18.8%)
🥈Silver (2455 games)	0.36 (aka, one out of every 3 games)	526 (21%)	223 (8.5%)
🥉Bronze (11087)	0.09	634 (5.7%)	174 (0.96%)

So what do I make of this?

More developers should be making DLC! Please!

I understand that expansion packs can be expensive to make. Wait on them until you are sure you have a hit and have done some free updates.
I understand that you are tired of this game you already spent years on. But, keep at it.
I understand you want to seem cool and asking for more money is “cringe.” 

But, almost a third of diamond tier games and more than half of Gold-tier games didn’t even have a “supporter” pack or soundtrack available for download.

Please, charge money for your art. 
Please, ask your fans to support you.
Please, I don’t want you to have to get a real job. 

So many developers told me in the survey that their fans love DLC because it was a chance to go back into their favorite world. Your fans want to hear from you.

What type of DLC is common?

This estimation is a little rough… During the scrape, the script looks at the DLC title fo words most associated with each type of DLC. For instance, if the title of the DLC included the words “Soundtrack”, or “OST” I counted it as a “Soundtrack type.” 

But sometimes developers would do overly-creative way-too-cutesy stuff like call their Soundtrack “Tales of the bard” or “The sound of rain in Spring”

For “Cosmetics” DLC I just looked for words like “Cosmetic”, “Armor”, “Pack”, or “Hat” 

If the script couldn’t guess what type of DLC it was based on keywords, it just assigned “Expansion” to it. 

Tier	Total expansion packs	Total Soundtracks	Total Cosmetics	Total Supporter Packs	Total Artbook
💎Diamond (303 games)	515	112	33	30	15
🥇Gold (611 games)	315	198	43	30	32
🥈Silver (2455 games)	325	352	33	35	45
🥉 Bronze (11087)	463	402	46	11	29

Look at how much opportunity there is there. So many more developers should be making supporter packs. 

But people hate DLC because it is a blatant money grab

AKA HORSE ARMOR! 

Actually, players don’t hate DLC as much as we fear.

If I grab just the Diamond and Gold games of 2024 and I look at the correlation between their positivity rating and the number of DLCs, the Spearman correlation is 0.005. 

Remember the closer the Spearman correlation is to 1 or -1 the stronger the relationship. A Spearman correlation of -1.0 means a perfect negative relationship between the number of DLC and the review score.

0.005 is nothing.

But what about those “awful” games that load themselves up with DLC that in sum costs thousands of dollars.

Let’s see…

If you filter for games that have 5 or more DLC (a heavy micro-transaction monetized game aka horse armor) then the Spearman correlation is -0.140.

So there is a very very slight impact when there are more than 5 DLCs. But not much. And remember correlation does not mean causation. It could be that the “heavy DLC” games are also games-as-a-service games have more invested and passionate audiences who have a lot of opinions and cause the review score to go down. The high DLC count just correlates with those types of games. 

But most DLC-heavy games have very positive review ratings. 

For instance, Train Sim World 5 has 129 DLCs and they are typically in the $29.99-$39.99 range. 

But despite that “money grab” it has 1,138 very positive reviews

Summary

So based on the actual DLC sales data, and the time it takes to make, my conclusion is that most Diamond and Gold Games should launch with at least a soundtrack and a supporter pack and they should bundle them all together.

Even if your game is probably not going to be Gold or Diamond (low wishlists, content creators ignore it) at least make some launch DLC. It is good practice for your next game. 

DLC might not always be yacht money, but it is a very high return on the time investment.

However, if you do have a bronze or silver tier game, I don’t think you should spend your time making Expansion Pack style DLC. The opportunity cost of working on that DLC instead of your next game is too great. Make more games, one of them will hopefully reach “real Steam” and then you can really lay on the DLC.