☠️ How to publish your game on Steam

Hi guys!

As you know, I planned the post about Steam since the 1.5 release. It was postponed a few times, so I could include more interesting details. Aaand I got the latest update recently: MyJLC is banned from Steam for ‘involving a minor’. …I'm speechless (and ruined). 

So. How you should (not) publish your game on Steam =)

I hope this will be a bunch of cool stories for you, and maybe (!) it might save you a few hours if you're ever going to publish your own game. And a large respect to those, who already completed this quest – it appeared to be much more intriguing than I expected.

Unfortunately I can not add any useful screenshots here as I have no access to store page editors anymore. 

Welcome to Steamworks 

First of all, you should create a Steamworks account. This requires a lot of personal data, including the things I've never heard about earlier. E.g. when I called my bank and asked for the physical address of their correspondent partner for Swift payments, they had just nothing to say. Everyone said nobody needs that information, but you can just find and submit it or go away. On this step I guess Steam got more of my data than anyone before, including my bank, my previous employers and my government. 

Steamworks UI looked a bit scary. It reminded me of Amazon Web Services (which I dug into to provide you with cloud saves). I guess all large infrastructure things are destined to look like this. Probably a powerful tool for an expert, but kind of ‘OMG, what should I do with this’ when you're seeing it for the first time. A folder of welcome guides didn't help, instead making things look even more complicated. So I found a step by step guide on wikihow and at least it pointed out where to start from.

Okay, create a product (this is what you paid a fee for), write the descriptions, add screenshots and all necessary promotional images, upload build, submit everything for review – it doesn't look that hard, just requires time. You also get a nice checklist on the game dashboard showing what should be done.

Metadata

Everything starts with a large number of checkboxes, list of supported platforms, system requirements, tags and many tiny things you should figure out. Also your game requires a kind of questionnaire to define what's exactly NSFW in it. This way I found that Germany strictly requires an age rating, so MyJLC won’t be shown here. (the same as hundreds of other indie games). That's sad, but I'm not going through licensing because of this, sorry.

The launch date you choose should be at least 2 weeks after your store page goes up. So if you ever thought about whether you should publish your game immediately or slow down to collect some wishlists – you literally have no choice. 2 weeks of ‘coming soon’ are required, you only choose to show the date or keep it mysterious. 

The Steam team says wishlists (number of people who wish listed the game) technically affect nothing. However experts say it affects game promotion indirectly. This is the only indicator to somehow predict the players reaction. Like more wishlists = more sales = more chances for Steam to promote the game as ‘popular’. This probably differs for free games, but I hoped to invite you to wishlist it. If MyJLC ever appears on the Steam main page, that would be super cool.

Ok, now a weird thing about tags: you can not add adult tags with their wizard. All adult games have them, but my page preview was missing it. Are those added automatically after the publishing? Probably, just confusing, as you mostly look at other games and try to do the similar.

Then, an interesting fact about system requirements. Being a small dev you have no ability to test your game on numerous devices. So minimal requirements are usually assembled from general game engine requirements and/or the worst machine you could find to test your game. This way I found that MyJLC works fine on 10-years old Intel HD 4000 graphics (because I'm hoarder and keep all my old gadgets in the wardrobe). This also means that minimum requirements for indie games usually mean nothing, so you better try the game yourself.

Game description

In general there are near to no rules for it. It shouldn't contain any links (or banners, or QR-codes). Everything you want to share should go to the side block to keep design clear. And you cannot share links to Patreon, Ko-fi or any other place where players could spend money -_-. Publicly it says that in-game transactions should only go through Steam. But IRL, any mentions of payments or donations outside of Steam are strictly forbidden. I bet if you have a good lawyer and a lot of time, you could fight for it, but I doubt it's worth it.

Dangerous observation: I saw a few games with forbidden banners on localized page versions. It seems that only the main English version is heavily moderated. Or some devs add things later and nobody cares. Anyway I won't recommend it, as I guess, you could be kicked out for breaking the rules easily.

Oh, one more: I was going to publish MyJLC as an ‘early access’ title, so this required some additional block with key points like ‘why’, ‘when’, ‘how will you involve the community’, etc. But Patreon-driven development hardly fits the questionary. And I got a feeling that you don't have much freedom when writing those. Unfortunately I couldn't finish this test to find how abstract the acceptable answers should be.

I understand that all those guidelines and moderation are primarily designed to improve the end player experience. The joke is sometimes it ends up looking more like censorship (again). 

Screenshots

It's always difficult to collect enough screenshots for a single-scene game, so I try to be creative here. One thing: your game should have at least 4 SFW screenshots to appear in some areas. Here I was stuck for a long time. All my best attempts failed the moderation, so I had to go without safe screenshots and missing ‘some areas’. Also that day I saw a game on the main page with black screens saying ‘adult content’, so I'm wondering now, what is the place more significant than the main page. It's a mystery.

Capsule images

Promotional materials mostly include a large number of banners of all sizes called capsule images. And this was what took the most time before initially submitting my page.

I'm not complaining, just wondering why Steam uses so many images of different (quite specific) sizes. This means you cannot make one good image and rescale it. Instead you should add some margins, adjust sizes, reslice the background so nothing important is covered, etc.

Many years ago when building e-commerce shops it was kind of a rule: the products have square photos, so ALL UI around is designed to contain square photos. Nobody uploads a photo of toaster for the main page, toaster for sidebar promotion and a separate toaster to be shown in newsletters. For some reason gaming platforms went the opposite way. The same is true for itch.io and all the sites I've ever published the game – just they require less variations.

Ok, of course, I'm joking: nobody requires a separate image for newsletters. And it's obvious that the background image should differ from the game capsule, and the very small capsule should be a separate asset to be readable. However I'd get rid of some of those if you ask me. 

Despite that variety of images, mostly all of those should be SFW as they might be shown all over the store. And this was the first feedback I got from the review team later: your capsule images are too suggestive. 

Here the problem starts: nobody says what exactly is wrong. The same is true for Patreon and any other censored platform. They usually come and say: ‘your post is not appropriate’, ‘your story contains violence’, ‘your photo contains adult material’. Then you should guess, is it because of a toy on the shelf, cleavage or some word in description. In my case I found the reason quickly: a few (quite vanilla) toys laying nearby were considered suggestive content. Ok, why not, I only hate the guess game.

Uploading your game 

This appeared to be the easiest step in the end. You have to set up a container (bucket) for each build (e.g. 1 per OS) and define which executable to run to start the game. Then download their command line tool (SDK Steamworks), write a small config for it describing which files to put into each container – and that's all. It's distributed with enough examples, so it was quite easy.

A few more interesting discoveries on the way:

I found that an icon for your game is required in .ico format, but some .ico files simply don't work. I tried a few different converters until I found one suggested by another developer.

Your account password should not contain some special symbols (in my case ‘$’) or SDK just won't accept it. Lol, you don't expect such kind of bugs from a largest gaming corporation.

Review

After you finish everything and your checklist is highlighted green, you submit things for review. Technically your game and its store page are reviewed separately. In practice it seems that the store page cannot be approved until your game is. 

My first impression of the support team was nice: my page was rejected with a list of problems to fix, some suggestions and links to documentation. It took around a week (Steam says it takes 2-5 days, up to 7 days if there are problems). Still I had to clarify what exactly is ‘suggestive’ in my materials. 

Then I found each iteration and even the smallest answer takes 2-5 days. It looks like your support ticket just goes back to the general pool and a random person checks it each time. Must say, it feels really uncomfortable, like you're on call and listening to the relaxing music ‘your call is important for us’ while being redirected between numerous offices. Each single person was quite supportive and nice, but all together it feels just bad. 

Also each review stage isn't complete, so even if you fix everything, you can get the new list of unrelated things the next round.

At some stage they couldn't answer my question about the rules (?) and I was redirected to another department. They explained I should not collect donations outside of Steam (even if agreement says only about in-game things). 

And then I finally received a happy letter about my build, after 3 weeks of silence. The support person was quite polite, but it changed nothing: the ticket is closed, the game is removed, no updates will be accepted and I have no single idea what triggered it. Twin tails? Small chest? Striped lingerie? Drawing style? – I don't know.

***

What can I say in the end? Steam is a cool platform and I love it as a gamer. It's quite good for SFW games, at least pros >>> cons. But not for adult ones. Should I consider it as a platform to release my next projects? – not sure now, it feels risky as I got no explanations at all.

Thank Collective Shout for overblown censorship once more? Adult content was always oppressed and limited on most of the platforms. After the latest events it will only become worse, just it’s not the topic of today's post.

I hope you found something interesting for you.

Have a calming weekend!