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There's a deep, dark, and milky secret about a handful of highly successful developers on Steam: Valve likes to send them chocolates at the end of the year. Rumors about Valve's mysterious "chocolate tier" have become more prominent over the past year or so, and it very much seems that those whispers are true.
Perhaps the most detailed breakdown of chocolate tier out there comes courtesy of games marketing consultant Chris Zukowski, who published a video in December laying out the basics as he understands them from speaking with developers over the years. According to Zukowski, Valve will send out a high-end box of chocolate to developers who meet a threshold of roughly $800,000 in annual revenue.
As Zukowski understands, Valve sends out a chocolate box worth roughly $150 to developers meeting that $800,000 threshold in annual revenue. For the small batch of developers reaching $2 million in annual revenue, they get a $250 chocolate box – specifically this one from Fran's. $250 is a pretty small gesture in light of that kind of revenue, but it's a nice way for Valve to say congrats and happy holidays to Steam's most successful devs.
I came to learn of chocolate tier through a Game File interview (paid article link) with the Peak devs – the same one where we learned that $8 is five bucks. Peak is a collaboration between the devs at Landfall Games and Aggro Crab. The latter studio happens to share office space in Seattle with Mega Crit, the dev behind the wildly successful roguelike deckbuilder Slay the Spire, sometimes to their chagrin.
"Every year they got fucking chocolates that we didn't," Aggro Crab co-founder Nick Kaman jokes in that interview. He was apparently pretty sure that the studio's goofy 2024 Soulslike, Another Crab's Treasure, had met the necessary milestone for the chocolate tier, but no chocolate had arrived. He says he emailed Valve about the no-show candy box and got an apology.
This past year, with over 11 million copies of Peak sold, Aggro Crab did finally get its chocolate. Producer Joanna Lin tells Game File that the milk chocolate salted caramel pieces are especially good.
