Consolidates game store payouts and automates revenue-share waterfalls for indie studios, publishers and contractors; B2B SaaS at $149-$399/mo · game studio back office
DEAD SLOW · CAUTIOUS
6.0 ShipScore / 10
Productized SaaS frees time; game-royalty demand is unproven and the niche is small.
Condition: At least 5 of 15 interviewed publishers or multi-contractor studios must confirm they now pay accountants or spend days in spreadsheets on royalty statements, and commit to pay $149+/mo.
Part I — The Verdict what the instruments read
01 — The ShipScore breakdown
Control
6
C6: payouts come from many stores, but Steam's report format dominates ingestion.
Entry barriers
6
E6: no tracked rivals; console NDA data and store integrations form a modest moat.
Need
5
N5: zero Reddit, funding or radar signals, so demand is unproven, not negative.
Time-freedom
8
T8: automated waterfall calculations recur monthly without operator labor.
Scale
5
S5: global but limited to studios with multi-party revenue splits.
What the five commandments measure
C — Control
Do you own the customer, or does a gatekeeper stand between you and revenue?
E — Entry
How hard is this to copy once it works? A rival's existence isn't the question — the durability of their advantage is.
N — Need
Is demand proven with money rather than vibes?
T — Time
Can income detach from your hours, or did you buy yourself a job?
S — Scale
How far does it reach without linear cost?
Scored on the evidence below, against CENTS as we've adapted it plus a Buffett-style moat reading of every rival — the same referee for every idea, including the ones we generate ourselves. The verdict follows the arithmetic: we never relabel a score to make it read better, and the weakest commandment is always named. The exact rubric stays in-house so the scale can't be written for.
02 — The pace test — $1M/yr
At $199/mo (assumed category price), you need 419 subscribers for a $1M/yr pace.
No tracked rivals with verified revenue to benchmark against.
Part II — The Evidence the receipts, good and bad
03 — Rival scan
No similar products found in the radar corpus — either genuinely novel, or too small to track.
ArtistOps — Already does royalty, recoupment and split logic for music labels and could port it to games.
Payout Orchard — Multi-store payout-to-books consolidation is the same ingestion layer, just aimed at e-commerce.
Recohive — Its reconciliation and receipt-matching features overlap the payout-matching half of the idea.
04 — Demand evidence
Demand is unproven: no radar products, no funded companies and no Reddit signals were found.
X chatter is near-zero, and no complaints are tied to these terms.
The only adjacent X launches (ArtistOps, Payout Orchard) show that royalty and payout tools exist in other verticals.
05 — Risks
Indie studios may be too small or cash-poor to pay $149-$399/mo instead of using spreadsheets.
Bespoke publisher contracts (recoupment, tiers, territories) may require consulting-heavy onboarding.
Console store data sits behind NDAs, and parsing it may be manual and brittle.
Publishers with real volume may already run in-house tooling or use their accounting firms.
06 — Kill switches — what kills this with one decision
Steam (Valve) financial reporting access — If Valve changes or restricts its partner sales and payout export, the core ingestion for most indies breaks.
Console platform NDAs (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft) — If platforms forbid third parties from processing their partner payout data, the product loses multi-store consolidation.
Part III — The Plan if you insist on proceeding
07 — What this scan can't tell you
This scan cannot tell how many studios actually run multi-party revenue shares.
It cannot verify whether accounting firms or publisher in-house tools already serve this need offline.
It cannot assess how standardized game publishing contracts are enough to automate.
Scores judge the market and business model — not your ability to execute. Verified MRR = independently tracked revenue; reviews/upvotes = platform-reported. Judged 2026-10-08.
08 — The wedge & the next step
Small-to-mid indie publishers running 5-30 titles with developer recoupment deals: automate their quarterly royalty statements to developers.
Cheapest next step: Message 20 indie publishers and multi-contractor studios on LinkedIn and Discord asking how they produce royalty statements today, and pre-sell a $199/mo pilot.
Not quite it? Spin the model
Business-model variations of this idea, engineered to beat 6.0 — different vertical, audience, model, or wedge. Same harsh scale. Pro feature.
One evidence-backed gap a day, free
Close — but conditional. Every morning the engine files one mined gap, scored on the same harsh scale as this one. Free at 7am AEST, unedited.
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