How to Sell Your Game on Steam!

hey this is Jonas I'm one of the developers of Islanders and we recently published our first game through Steam in case you don't know what Simas steam is basically the biggest online store for video games and it has always been one of my biggest dreams to get one of my games up there now I finally did it and it's super duper awesome so in this video I want to tell you how you can get your game onto steam as well the good news is it's super duper easy the times of steam greenlight are over we're now in the age of steam direct which means everybody can upload a game to steam the only thing you need is a Steam account a game and 100 bucks and if you have those three things then you can upload your game to steam of course that means there's also a lot of computation on Steam but at the same time there are also a lot of customers on Steam so I think Roy okay little disclaimer please keep in mind this is not a step-by-step tutorial I don't have enough experience for that I literally just uploaded one game to Steam so what I can do is I can tell you the basics and then I can link you a couple of resources in case you want a more detailed description but

this video will just be a very rough overview on how the publishing process on Steam looks like simply because I don't have enough experience yet to give you a more in-depth tutorial step number one you need a steam account and again if you don't have a steam account yet then go make a steam account and if you don't have a game yet then go make a game step number two is sign up to Steamworks which is the backend for developers where you upload your games where your manage and handle your games where you can see all of your steps for that you could just go to the Steamworks website and log in with your standard Steam account then you have to fill in a bunch of data about your company yeah I guess you need some sort of legal entity slash company in order to sell games on Steam or if you made the game alone and all of the rights belong to you you can also enter so proprietorship into the field for your company form that seems to be an option as well unfortunately I can't give you any legal advice on that because I'm already myself super confused by all of this I know a little bit of how it works in Germany I have

absolutely zero idea of how this works in other countries so best inform yourself and then once you've committed all of that data I think they will check it see if it all looks good and then you're ready to go step number three is to create a new game in Steamworks there should be a button number that allows you to create a new project slash a new game this is where you'll have to give valve 100 bucks which is basically just a safety measure meant to stop people from uploading huge amounts of garbage if you manage to make $1,000 in revenue you even get those $100 back little warning the Steamworks interface is quite big and a little confusing there are a lot of buttons and some things are a little hard to find if you can't find something then a good place to check is just the official documentation by valve they did a very decent job of documenting everything and if you want to do something specific just search for it in the documentation or ask Google you know that's something I did a couple of times as well how can I do this ain't that in Steamworks and usually you'll get the answer the next

step is to implement the Steamworks API into your game if you want to use something like sim leaderboard steam achievements then you need the Steamworks API I don't know how it works for different engines for unity you just download Steamworks top net from github put that into your game and then you get access to all of the Steamworks functions for example there's a function to unlock achievements there are functions to request leaderboard data and then that leaderboard dater sent you a synchronously and then once you've got that you can display the leaderboard data some things seem to be a little easier some things are a little more complicated unlocking an achievement is literally just one line of code and then some of the guessing functions are a little trickier to figure out I think but all in all very doable especially when having a look at the Steamworks documentation every now and then it is possible you can do it step number five is you can upload your game to Steam unfortunately there's not just a simple upload button on the Steamworks website no you need to download two tools steam command and the sim Works

SDK both of which can be found on Valve's websites somewhere I guess a link it in the description and what you get is basically a bunch of command line tools where you have to hack in the right commands like a hacker in order to get your game uploaded to Steam you need to mess with some text files a little bit enter the ID of your game that you can on the Steamworks website it all feels a little hacky there really some very good tutorials out there for this it's not as complicated as it sounds it just takes a bit of time to figure out how it works took me personally about one day and then once you understood all the upload process works and you once you've got it all set up then it doesn't really take all that long anymore it's just logging in in Steam command into your steam account typing one line hitting Enter and then waiting until your game is uploaded it's relatively simple once you've got it working and then once you've uploaded your game via Steam command your game should appear in Steamworks as a new package and if that is the case then you know it worked

step number six should be to get all of your Steamworks settings right to start setting up your store page filling in some data or uploading some screenshots maybe even uploading a trailer if you already got one once you have all of those Steamworks settings set up properly you should already be able to download the game in steam it should already be in your library even if the game and even if the store page have not been published yet if you are one of the developers of the game it should show up in your Steam library automatically and you should be able to download and test the game the next step would be to publish the store page which by the way it's not the same as publishing the game publishing the store page just means that the store page will be visible to the public but they will not be able to download the game yet I think you already need to have some sort of a game file though because your store page and your game file need to go through an approval process somebody at Steam will have a look at your store page and they will have a look at your game see if they work if they are ok and if they are

then your store page will be published so for those of you who were wondering that's a real human look at your game before you publish it to steam because there sometimes seem to be very low quality standards on Steam yes that is the case as far as from what I could tell because we actually got some feedback that I think could not have been written by a machine when we try to get our store page approved and we got the feedback that some of our screenshots didn't have any UI however it's not possible to turn the UI off in the games or the screenshots were misleading that was something we had to fix and that obviously is something that I think only a could notice so yeah steam actually does some real quality control they actually launch the games and have a look at them however as far as I can tell they only do it the first time they only do it one time and then with all of the updates you publish to your game or to your store page they'll just trust you that you won't mess it up too much and honestly that sounds like a pretty decent system to me don't forget to set a release date and the steam work

settings because that will show up on your store page which is obviously good and it will also help you to appear in that popular upcoming section on steam step number eight would probably be to generate a bunch of review keys and maybe even retail keys in case you don't know what a steam key is a steam keys basically a random combination of numbers and letters and if somebody enters a steam key they will get the game for free they will unlock the game so if you want to sent the game to media to press two a couple of reviewers you can send them a review key and they will be able to play the game before launch if you don't want them to be able to play the game before launch you can send them on normal retail key and that will unlock the game once the game is out what I found very interesting about this is that you can firstly generate as many retail keys as you want and secondly you are allowed to sell the retail keys on different platforms you can just generate 10,000 retail keys and then sell them on your website or give them to Humble Bundle so they can sell the keys for you and what's even more interesting is that if you do that if

you sell the steam keys yourself steam doesn't even take a cut from your revenue usually steam takes a cut from your revenue but if you sell the steam keys yourself you get 100 percent of the earnings freudian trash congestion why does steam do that I think the reason is because it helps them to get new people to their platform basically they don't have any work selling anything yeah I have no idea why they do it's it's just cool it's just cool thank you valve at the same time I have to admit that I feel like it doesn't really make any sense for us at the moment to sell our steam key somewhere else because guess what steam has a huge amount of users a huge amount of users that are willing to buy games more importantly though selling your games on Steam is still more beneficial though step 9 is don't forget to hit the publish button on launch day you should have already published your store page that should already be up but you also need to publish your game otherwise people won't be able to download it and that is just one button press more or less but even if you've

set the launch date for your game the game will not unlock automatically at the date you still need to manually make the game publicly available and that is when you pray through the Steam gods that everything goes well once your game is officially out step number 10 is to interact with your community in the community hub the reason I mentioning this is because I personally didn't know there is a community hop on Steam but it's actually a really awesome place for players to discuss your game and they will probably also post bug reports and feature requests there so hanging out in the community hub and answering a couple of questions having a look at everything that's going on there is probably a good idea also updating your game is something that's required that you want to do or something that needs to be done to fix a buck and if you want to do that then you can just use the same upload procedure as last time using steam command and Steam SDK once you do that the new build will show up on Steam then usually what you do is you don't just publish that right away what you do is

you publish that separate branch to a beta branch so you can test it and maybe a couple of other people can test it and then if it works then you publish it to the public just right away publishing updates to the public is a little risky if you don't know if they work yet so I think the standard workflow for that is definitely to publish your changes or your updates to a separate beta branch first you can protect your beta branch with a password so you can just give the password to a couple of people they can download the beta version of your game and tell you if anything's going horribly wrong and if not then you can just roll the beta version out to everybody and give everybody access to the game version step number 11 is to have a look at your stats look at all that money coming in steam collects a bunch of really interesting stats about your game where all of your traffic is coming from how many people buy the game of course and what your click-through rate is for the thumbnail what your conversion rate is and all of that is obviously something you might want to

have an eye on simply because it's interesting but it might also allow you to optimize a couple of things unfortunately as I've said in the beginning the floodgates are open there's a lot of competition on Steam so what I want to talk about next week is how do you successfully launch a game on Steam how do you do the marketing for your game also something I'm not an expert in by any stretch of human imagination but I'd still like to share my thoughts on that topic so if you're interested in that heated subscribe button if you're lucky the videos already out and I'll link it somewhere here hope you enjoyed watching I wish you good luck with getting your game on two-seam I really hope you make it if you do send me a link I wanna see it bye bye