Every major game creation platform calls itself creator-first. You hear it at keynotes, read it in investor decks, see it splashed across landing pages. And if you only look at the headlines, you might believe it. Leading platforms are collectively paying out billions to creators annually. That sounds like a company that puts creators at the centre of everything.
Then you look at how the money actually moves. A player spends $1 in the app. The app store takes the first 30 cents. The platform keeps the bulk of what is left. By the time the dust settles and the creator converts their earnings back to cash, they take home around 25 cents on the original dollar. The platform – and the app stores between it and the creator – keep the other 75 cents. Creator-first starts to look a long way from where we're standing.
And even that 25 per cent is misleading, because the money pools almost entirely at the top. Top-tier developers on leading platforms can average millions annually. But the median creator who actually qualified to cash out – and most never do, because minimum payout thresholds keep earnings locked – earned around $1,575 for the entire year. Fifteen hundred dollars. For twelve months of work on the world’s biggest game creation platform. Millions more fell below even that threshold and earned nothing at all.
Not only is this unfair, but it also has serious downstream implications in terms of what gets made. If you are keeping 25 cents on every dollar, you need enormous scale to earn anything meaningful. A game pulling in $5,000 a month in player spend – which is already a solid audience – nets you $1,250 after the platform takes its cut. You cannot live on that. So, every creator is pushed toward the same playbook: chase the widest possible audience, copy the mechanics that already work, optimise for engagement metrics. The economics don’t reward the originality that makes games worth playing.
Flip the split and the whole picture changes. Give a creator 70 per cent and that same $5,000 a month becomes $3,500. That is not life-changing money, but it is livable. More importantly, it means someone building for a smaller community can actually pay their rent doing so. The weird game, the niche genre, the thing built for a specific audience rather than everyone – all of that becomes financially viable when the creator keeps the majority of what they earn. That is how you get a diverse creative ecosystem. Not by running creator funds or spotlight programmes but by making an economy that works for creators at scale.
Now, platforms will tell you they need that 75 per cent because hosting games is expensive, and they are not entirely wrong. It is a fair point, and it deserves a straight answer. Running a game platform is harder than running YouTube. A video is a file that gets streamed. A multiplayer game involves real-time servers, physics, matchmaking, cross-device networking, moderation all happening simultaneously for millions of players. We can all agree that this is a costly endeavour and not something the platforms should be providing for free.
But the gap between what that infrastructure actually costs and 75 per cent is significant. YouTube serves more than two billion users a month, handles video in every format across every device, moderates content in over 100 languages, and still pays creators 55 per cent. Apple runs the entire App Store - Payments, compliance, review, global distribution and more – and takes 30 per cent. Even that has faced significant antitrust scrutiny. Yes, games are heavier to host than video and nobody is arguing otherwise. But there remains a wide space between a fair platform margin and keeping three out of every four dollars.
But a better revenue split on its own is not enough if the system underneath was never designed with creators as the priority. The tools, the economics and the incentives all must point in the same direction. That requires something new and there are two converging forces paving the way.
- First, the creator class is changing. The next wave of game makers will come from approximately 250 million creators already earning a living on other media platforms. These people know what a fair split looks like and would not tolerate the meagre 25 cent split we currently see in gaming.
- Second, AI-native creation tools are about to massively expand the number of people who can build games. Until now, the complexity of game development kept the creator base small. AI removes that barrier. When millions of new creators can go from idea to playable game in hours rather than years, the total market grows in ways that benefit everyone, but only on platforms where the economics make it worth creating in the first place.
This is why we are building SPARQ, an AI-native game engine, licenced at Innovation City Ras Al Khaimah, where “creator first” is not a marketing line but a founding principle. SPARQ pays creators 70 per cent. Not as a launch promotion, not as a creator fund, not contingent on hitting a threshold – just the actual platform economics, from day one.
Gaming is a $300 billion industry built on the work of creators getting a fraction of what they deserve. Every other creator economy figured this out years ago. The question now is which platforms – and which ecosystem – will build the economy that finally gets it right.
This article was contributed by Christoffer Wilhelmsen, he is the COO and Co-Founder of SPARQ, the AI-native game engine headquartered in the UAE. A serial entrepreneur with a track record of scaling ventures to commercial success, he leads SPARQ's operations, fundraising, and business development. Christoffer has steered the company from early concept through a $2.5 million self-funded development phase to a 20+ global engineering team and a 6,000-strong creator waitlist, positioning SPARQ for its $8.5 million seed round with participation from leading US venture firms. His focus now is scaling SPARQ from beta to global launch, with a commercial strategy built around the 250 million content creators currently locked out of game development. Originally from Norway, he is a vocal advocate for the Middle East as a launchpad for globally ambitious tech companies and brings deep cross-border experience to SPARQ's expansion strategy. He is based in Dubai, UAE.
This article was originally published on Khaleej Times.
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