How to publish on Steam

How do I get my game on Steam?

Go HERE, to Steam Direct, pay 100 dollars. Get your game on the store. Earn over 1000 and get your money back.

How do you release a game on Steam?

Intro

Getting your game on Steam is beyond easy. Just pay the money and you get your game on Steam. There are some more specific steps listed in the link above, but beyond that, you don’t need much help on this. Maybe getting your game actually physically uploaded to the store and playable, might prove a challenge, but not a big one. If you’re capable of making a game you’re capable of managing the technical minutia of getting it on the store. Unless you’re doing something very strange or politically or religiously off color or illegal, you’re fine, they will approve your game if it is remotely functional.

There is a brief period of review where the Steam team will play your game, decide if they want it on the store, which in most cases they do, and then you just build your store page, which is a really fun and easy process. You can make a really complex, really fun store page, really easily through their excellent UI.

I remember it well.

What to avoid

Well, you can post as much violence as you want. You can make the most violent game in the world. Conversely, if you want to make a game like GalGun, or another adult type game, they’re ok with that. As long as you’re not showing real humans, they will publish your game.

Keep an eye on the latest cultural trends, in the news. Don’t make fun of any of their holy grails. Also if you say anything really offensive, you’re toast. If it’s religiously offensive, and not against Jesus, who is A OK to mock, you’re toast. Doing anything illegal, goodbye.

Yeah that’s basically the qualifier, you can be as sexy or violent as you want, just don’t be offensive. Perhaps in time this view will change, and even offensive games will be allowed, but for now stick to toilet jokes, jesus rpgs, and h novels if you want to be offensive.

Beyond that, make whatever you want, make any game you want, make lots of them. Get about 10 games on the store, each one bringing in some decent money, you could be CEO of your own company, legit.

What kind of game should I make?

Make whatever game you want. Find the game you want to make and make it. If Steam’s restrictions are too much for you to handle, you can branch out onto other stores, and get your game up somewhere.

You should think really hard about the games you’ve played since you were a kid, there’s probably a game or a theme you wish you could play, there’s probably no perfect game for you, yet. This is your own game calling to you. You should find what you want to build and build it. If it is the game you want to play, then other people will want to play it. And honestly, if you build your game to be what you think other people would like, they won’t really like it much anyway.

Every gamer has something like that, a perfect game they’ve always wanted to play. For me it’s just a very mature game that deals in taboo themes, but for you it could be anything, if you’re a new father, maybe you’ll discover you want to make the next Banjo Kazooie.

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Don’t waste time on a 9-5 grind at McDonalds, if you’re young and skilled and a gamer, you can easily displace all that low level service work for game design working from home, all you need is a gaming PC, you have one, and download the free Unreal Engine 5, or Unity if you choose wrong, and start looking on self employment sites and boom, you can stay at home with your family all day, and still earn a full time wage, at an equivalent rate to what you were earning before, and we can teach you all the skills you need to get there, so check it out.

Steam banned me, what do I do now?

Oh you’ve been a bad boy haven’t you?

*shakes head*

Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of other stores out there. You can always go with Itch.io, for instance, they’ll take anything, but judging by your ban, you might have to look into more unorthodox methods for selling your game.

This is a family friendly blog, we’re not going to discuss specifics, but believe you me, there are people out there, who will be happy to publish your um…. erm….. “game”.

My game is illegal, what do I do now?

Contact your local police station and ask them to resolve it for you.

Conclusion

It is easy beyond belief to get your game on Steam, it will give you a nice notch in your belt for finding work, get enough games on there, doing well enough, you won’t even need work. Steam is a viable, if not THE viable games selling platform, it IS a monopoly, the other competitors, just don’t have the same reach, the same audience, they also often have harsher and more restrictive TOS, STEAM actually is a good free speech platform, as long as you don’t go overboard like I did. You really have to work hard to earn a ban from them, you have to be testing the limits of the ban to get there. Really if you have a game, you made, sell it on Steam, it’s easy and fun and so worth it in every way, you can even make a living off of it if you do well enough.

Build you game,

Make your dream,

Make it a reality.

Make money.

By the way, if you’re making a game, I hope you can make one as good as this, the best game of all time, Pathologic Classic HD.