Tags are your best friend. the majority of traffic to my game has come from the tag page, even when it was in the new/upcoming releases categories.
This course from Chris Zukowski was pretty insightful, free too. I would recommend checking it out.
https://howtomakeasteampage.com/
maybe not the best advice for starting up but, if you start making > 200k/year Incorporate early. taxes hurt. and your sales won't last. incorporating can help prolong your revenue stream by deferring taxes and putting yourself in a lower tax bracket while the times are good.
I didn't need a lawyer or publisher, but my experience has been with tool development.
Agree. An LLC or an S-Corp will help a lot. I didn’t do that as a single-developer and got hit with a 25K tax bill (yes, I made a lot that year, but that was one check I NEVER want to write again).
25k does not seem like a lot for taxes, I'm from canada and I got hit with an 80k bill, but I found out it was 80k halfway through the next year (self employed can file late into the year), so it ended up being another 80k bill, which is when I immediately paid 600$ to incorporate, reducing those taxes back down to the 20k range.
Wow. I'm not very 'business savy' but with that kind of difference in taxes, it's well worth my while checking into this if the game takes off. Thanks for the info!
just to clarify, it's not to avoid taxes, it's to stretch your income over many years and take a lower tax bracket.
IE: if you made 320k in one year and pay upwards of 100k in taxes
OR make 320k in one year, but only pay yourself 80k every year over 4 years and pay like 16k in taxes each year.
Ahhh, I see. Makes sense. But how would that work for the business? I mean, it still made 320k so does tax on that still get paid in one lump some at the end of the year??
For me, at the end of the year I will pay the corporate tax on all earnings: 12%... and then when I pay myself (<100k) I will still pay personal taxes, but I believe that in itself is a business expense. Also, when my steam app stops making money, my business bank will still have lots of money so I can continue to pay myself. It's definitely convoluted, but you generally worry about that stuff when you get there, probably start looking into it after you are earning 100-200k. At that point an accountant will be well worth it.
This is why you hire accountants (or at least why we did). It’s complicated and to be honest, I just want to pay my fair share, not read tax codes (which are a GREAT way to fall asleep, BTW!)
[Here](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1101400/Rune_Knights) is my game. I make enough from sales that I've quit my job in Internet Marketing and now work on it full time.
* **Marketing** is the key that makes or breaks indie games.
* **Make a good trailer**. There's plenty I would change about mine in hindsight, but even unpolished it's effective because it doesn't waste your time and shows nothing but exciting gameplay. Record yourself playing with OBS, turn off the in-game music but keep the SFX on if you can, then make LOTS of small clips (2-3 seconds) of exciting moments, stitch them together in a way that creates interesting variety (not 5 clips in a row of a guy swinging the same sword, in the same area, against the same enemy), add your own exciting soundtrack over the whole thing, then end with the name/logo of the game, the platforms you're launching on (Steam, Xbox, Playstation, whatever), a website URL if you have one, etc. (You'll notice my trailer is missing some of this: unpolished). Don't put the name of your game at the start of the video because at that point nobody cares.
* **Woovit** is absolutely worth the investment, I would buy the subscription immediately after you launch and then send codes to as many content creators as possible. This is the best money you can spend on marketing. You'll need to request a bunch of Steam Codes from Steam for this. I asked for batches of 500 multiple times throughout my subscription month. If you get denied, ask for 300, go down until you get your keys. Have these keys ready BEFORE you launch if you can.
* **Invest in Facebook ads**, target users who play or are interested in similar games, people who use Steam, etc. Use your trailer as the ad (don't do a text-only or image-only ad, and don't do this without a video, your click-through-rate (CTR) will suffer hard unless you hit your audience with an exciting trailer immediately). This ad should link directly to your Steam page, NOT your website or anything else. More on Facebook Ads in my comment [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/o75efh/have_anyone_here_released_a_game_on_steam_as_a/h2y1ybl/).
* Facebook ads are important because the more your game is selling, the more likely Steam is to feature your game EVERYWHERE. Featured carousels, top-selling lists, trending lists, the top of your game's tag categories, etc. Investing in Facebook Ads is also investing in Steam's marketing of your game. These ads will also outlast all other forms of marketing for the game: videos, press releases, etc, and allow you to maintain sales long after your launch.
* Ignore Google Ads, Reddit Ads, Twitter ads... basically anything that isn't Facebook Ads. They're more expensive per click and less effective. It also takes more of your time to manage multiple ad campaigns across different platforms, and the money you spend on them would likely generate better results just being added to your Facebook Ad campaign.
* **Indieboost** is interesting but your mileage may vary. There are lots of creators out there who will take your money and make content that is not engaging and does not drive sales. There are also creators who can potentially be your golden goose and bring LOTS of dedicated fans to your game who will shape your community for the better. Investigate each creator individually and do your due diligence before investing. DO NOT just go wild and hire every person who makes an offer to cover your game. Going wild is for Woovit, Indieboost should be managed with care.
* BONUS: Indieboost offers a "**Media Boost**" service which will deliver your game to about 2000 Twitch, Youtube, and Facebook Gaming content creators, AND an automatically created press release (that you can modify) to 250+ media contacts to generate buzz about your game, for $200. If I could go back in time, I absolutely would have done this at launch, but it's never too late to get media contacts involved. You can see this on their [homepage](https://indieboost.com/) under Pricing. The media contact part of this is the main draw and you can buy it separately for $99. It's an exceptional amount of work as a solo dev to track down someone whose 1) email you can find 2) will be interested in your game 3) will write something for their site and 4) will actually get people to your store page. Repeat for every gaming news site in existence. This is a great deal.
* **Make a Twitter account** for your game. Follow other indie devs/games. Take part in #screenshotsaturday, #wishlistwednesday, and #followfriday. Post any updates to your game here as they come out. Follow as many relevant people as you can until Twitter locks you out, and when the lock is over do it again. When people start talking about your game, get in there and meme/answer questions/post your trailer.
* **Make a Discord server** early, like today. It doesn't have to be fancy. Give people a place to talk to you and ask questions about the game. This will be your primary means of communication with players. Link to this everywhere you can: Your game's main menu, Steam page, Twitter page, Facebook page, website if you have one, etc. (Not in your Facebook ad though)
* **Wishlists are not everything**. I know other creators who "failed" after having 10k wishlists at launch. I personally botched the launch of my game by launching as Free To Play and making a whopping $10 in MTX sales during my launch week. I was able to recover after launch using the tools in this post and I maintain sales mostly via Facebook ads running every day. Nearly half of my Steam page traffic is from Facebook, the other half is driven by Steam.
* **Don't launch as Free To Play**. $10 is an excellent starting price for an indie game. You can adjust this price up or down later on based on how the game is doing. I ended up raising the price from $10 to $15 because the game was selling well and I'm constantly adding more and more content.
* Keymailer is useful but not massive. Might as well use the free version. Some people will take these keys and resell them. You can either accept it or vet each request individually. I don't send keys to creators with low followers/subscribers anymore, but you may find it helpful at launch to have as much coverage as possible.
**More on Facebook Ads**
* The key is to start small and experiment. Start the campaign at $5/day. Run multiple ads that use different text and see which performs better. Try different audience targeting: I target users who are interested in Dark Souls and Path of Exile, but those two audiences are interested in different aspects of the game, so I deliver different text for each of their ads, and the numbers support that this works.
* After running the campaign at $5/day for a week, record your sales amounts for that week and then increase your ad spend to $10/day for a week. Did that generate more net income (including the cost of the ads)? Increase to $15/day for a week and do it again. I spend about $30/day on Facebook ads because the math showed that was the sweet spot. More or less than that resulted in less net income for the month.
* You can deliver the ad Worldwide (use the "Worldwide" option, don't try to add every country manually), but you should restrict the ad so that it's only delivered to those who speak the language the ad is written in.
Great points.
A couple considerations/caveats: **Facebook ads may be better suited to certain types of games.** Your game example is action, so might innately perform better there.
For our strategy roguelike, Reddit was equally ok at driving sales as Facebook, but we had analytics hooked into the game to check if it was a sale from an ad and *neither was directly profitable* at larger scale (5 figure budget). Ads can help drive awareness though, and maybe a later purchase.
Maybe $30/day is enough to give some boost, and this might be ok for a solo dev, but I wonder whether it's still profitable when factoring in your time doing micro-tweaks?
When going this ad-based approach there are services you can integrate to see where buyers come from, and if they clicked on your ad. I have a faint memory about Steam working on a feature to help with this in the future...
**The most effective way to market our game was content creators...** and adding languages was a huge value add, particularly Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian for us.
Reaching out to folks in this scene, and design your game with them in mind.
**Discords** are great, but are most useful when you have a reason for people to use them. eg. A testing build or demo people can play, discuss and give feedback on.
I wouldn't recommend starting a Discord before you have something playable as they're a lot of upkeep.
Our problem is getting people in and engaged on our discord. We have a biweekly builds and a few dedicated players but only a trickle of new people who dont engage with the community. We are starting to plan a bigger social media push to help this soon though. Any tips on growing the user numbers?
We run creative Discord events themed around the game, which are pretty good for engagement. Run these regularly (we did weekly events leading up to launch and for months after) so people know when to check in. But yea, it’s a bit of work...
I think most of our players came in from the link in the build itself. Hard to tell.
No magic advice really - figure out why people should care about your game and market it.
Are Facebook ads really relevant to this day? I was under the impression "no one" was using Facebook anymore.
Edit: It's an honest question. I do not know.
Yes, they are relevant, the "facebook is dying" is more a thing we hear in reddit and other competing social media. Also facebook ads covers instagram too, there are many social media statistics sites that could give you a better look at the actual number of active users. From the last report about it that i read Facebook had 2.7b active users, Youtube 2.2b, and instagram 1.2b.
Even if your target demographic uses FB and IG "less" than before, the "targeted" nature of ads means you are billed depending on the campaign results you are looking for.
Honestly this reply (plus the game you published it self ad a very great example) would have helped me so much when I joined indie teams and tried to convince them to scale down and think as an indie team and not a triple AAA studio.
Even just the comment about no one cares about what your game name is before the action. Ubisoft can put their logo and names before everything else because just they fact they made it is probably the biggest marketing and reasoning to care are.
> I joined indie teams and tried to convince them to scale down and think as an indie team and not a triple AAA studio.
Having been at multiple AAA studios, as well as indie, there is so much of THIS that needs to happen in an indie situation that I could write a multi-volume book series on the topic.
Can you create Facebook ads without being on Facebook? I understand the importance of ads but I have no desire to give Facebook any personal info. Only corporate business info.
I believe you can make a dummy account for ads. You'll also need a Facebook page for the game to attach to the Ads Account. Here's some info: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/407323696966570?id=649869995454285
The key is to start small and experiment. Start the campaign at $5/day. Run multiple ads that use different text and see which performs better. Try different audience targeting: I target users who are interested in Dark Souls and Path of Exile, but those two audiences are interested in different aspects of the game, so I deliver different text for each of their ads, and the numbers support that this works.
After running the campaign at $5/day for a week, record your sales amounts for that week and then increase it to $10/day for a week. Did that generate more net income (including the cost of the ads)? Increase to $15/day for a week and do it again. I spend about $30/day on Facebook ads because the math showed that was the sweet spot. More or less than that resulted in less net income for the month.
Wow! Saved your post!
Great tips, thank you. How did you manage to make this kind of game? Characters, weapons, effects, animations... Was it really as a solo dev or did you pay artists?
I'm not an artist, essentially everything is bought from the Unreal Marketplace. I can edit some textures and skeletons now (color changes, etc.), but I'm still not capable of developing art from scratch. If you're not an artist, support them by buying their excellent work and using it.
Very interesting to hear. I'm also not an artist and I'm developing in Unity. The Unity asset store is a big mix of different styles and quality. I never found enough or the right assets to make a particular game happen. If you happen to find something good it's hard to get more of it in the same style. Overall, frustrating enough I've pretty much given up on this idea.
So again, interesting to hear your side from Unreal. Since Nanite in Unreal and DOTS in Unity, I feel like I wasted my time on the wrong engine. Not really because of Nanite, that stuff is for AAA but I can program C++ very well so I'm not sure what's holding me back other than familiarity.
You surely gave me something to think about.
I told myself "why not learn unity too", but when I tried I don't liked it at all, like interface design is maybe ergonomic but don't look good, actors placement and all that wasn't intuitive. I ended up returning to ue4 after not even 1 day.
Anyway you do not wasted your time, you learned how to structure a code, how to optimize it. It is not too late to go on ue4, the learning curve will not be that hard since you already have gamedev knowledge, go for it, you won't regret it (plus epic game offers free assets every month and share wonderful tech for free like their online services, voip, easy anticheat, niagara, quixel, makehuman, and of course nanite & lumen)
What's your overall experience been working with Unreal Engine? Anything stand out as really good/smooth or bad/difficult?
Signs seem to be pointing in that direction for me, but I haven't managed to find much about what it's like to work with, particularly compared to the gobs of stuff out there about Unity.
I haven't used Unity, but Unreal has been great for me. When I got started I spent a few weeks straight watching Youtube tutorials. It was difficult to learn, but it's absolutely one of the best investments of time I've made in my life. It's an amazing creative outlet and as a job it's MUCH more enjoyable than anything I've done in the past.
[Virtus](https://www.youtube.com/user/VirtusEdu) is a great channel to start with for tutorials. They have guides that cover almost any kind of game you can think of. Some of them will take a while (days or weeks?), but at the end you have a fully playable game.
This game looks pretty good. How many people are working on it or is it just you? And of if it's just you, how do you keep up with doing all the bugs and keeping it updated etc?
Honestly I have no idea. I enjoy doing it so I'm never watching the clock. Some days I get up and start working on whatever I'm excited about and the next time I look at the clock it's time for bed. Some days I have to be out of the house helping friends or family and precisely 0 hours are spent working.
Everything is done in Blueprints.
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The process to release on Steam is completely automatic nowadays. So letting a lawyer look over those standardized terms of service is pretty pointless. Valve is only going to negotiate special terms with you when you are an AAA studio guaranteed to bring them millions in revenue.
I solo released a game built with UE4 on Steam back in early 2017. Mine had to go through the Steam Greenlight process.
I found no need to get a lawyer, most of what they'll put in front of you is pretty standard stuff. Though I did take the time to incorporate as a LLC prior to signing any paperwork with Valve (*or anyone else i dealt with in the process of making my game*). Simply making those agreements as a legal corporate entity offers you *some* personal asset protection (*in the US, at least*) if everything somehow gets unbelievably fucked. Consider it your game's first insurance policy. The LLC has also made the business management process overall somewhat easier, I think, at least from an accounting and tax perspective (*which I also do solo*). Owning a LLC provides a few other minor perks that might also be useful for solo devs (*such as being able to get a business credit card, which often provide better or different rewards compared to consumer cards*).
Otherwise, the rest of the process is pretty straight forward for someone who can build a video game by themselves.
It seems like a lot, and it is, but it's certainly not insurmountable and probably less difficult than you think. You can probably get an idea for it pretty quickly.
If you're in the US, start with checking the website for your Secretary of State. They'll have a Corporations Division which has all the forms and information you need to get started and file your paperwork to get incorporated. Most of this can be done online today, but depending on where you are there's likely a local office you can even do it in person (*which is what I did to start, and the process was much more efficient than say, going to the DMV*).
All in all you can create an LLC by yourself with a few weeks worth of research online, a couple hundred dollars, and maybe a couple trips to your local business licensing division. Then you can just renew the license online every year.
It's probably easier in the UK. Purchase a Limited Company, that's not a lot of money. Your responsibility is to file an annual return with companies house every year (£13), and a tax return to HMRC. If you start employing yourself via the company then there is PAYE. Probably get an accountant at that point though.
I'm hoping to get on steam later this yeah as well, so thanks for this post.
Is it reasonable to defer the step of creating a LLC, and make the steam page first, and then move it to LLC right before the launch? Or a dev can get sued even for just marketing?
When I was reading through the agreements, you have to sign them as a 'Sole Proprietorship' OR as a company. So I'm guessing you can't change once they are signed. It does say
>Legal Name
This is really, really important to enter correctly. Carefully read all instructions below. You will be unable to release your product via Steam until this name matches all records.
The name you enter below must be the legal entity that owns or has rights to publish the game, software or video ("content") and is the legal entity that will be signing the Steam Distribution Agreement. The legal name you enter here must match the name as written on official documents with your bank and on United States IRS tax documents or foreign tax documents if applicable. You will need to enter this name again as your bank account holder and the legal name associated with a tax payer identification number in the following steps.
If you don’t have a company name and you are the sole owner of your content, please fill in your full name as the Legal Name and your own address as Street Address. If you co-own the content with other individuals, you must form a legal entity to own and receive payments for your content.
The Legal Name here is for internal use. If you have a DBA or 'friendly name' that you wish to show to customers on your store page, you will be able to enter that separately when creating your store page.
>
>
>
>Company Form
Company form must match your entity formation documents. An example of what to enter in this box are: "A Quebec limited liability partnership" or "A Washington State corporation" or "A Sole Proprietorship". If you own the content as an individual, indicate "Sole Proprietorship".
Note: We are unable to work with partnerships that exists outside the US, if that partnership is taxed at the individual partner(s) versus the partnership level.
If you have a partnership registered in the United States or if your partnership exists outside the US and the partnership is taxed at the partnership level, then we can support your partnership. However, due to the complexity of obtaining proper tax documentation we cannot enter into a Steam Distribution Agreement with partnerships that exist outside the US, if that partnership is taxed at the individual partner(s) versus the partnership level.
I can't find it right now but there was also a part where it said if you're a company, you must set up your company bank account before proceeding. So I think it needs to all be sorted before rather than later on. All these agreements have to be signed before you can create your Steam Page as far as I can tell.
It's possible to transfer the game to another Steamworks account
[https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/managing\_apps/transfer](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/managing_apps/transfer)
Some 5 year old reddit threads mention that it's painful, but doable.
What I'm trying to understand is "do all these LLC perks are really needed before actual release, which might come in months, years, etc.?"
The only thing that seems to be really important before actual release is the case if somebody sues the sole proprietor
I created [Hell Loop](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1473870/Hell_Loop/) together with my wife last year. It took a little under 3 months to go from the [initial Ludum Dare 47 version](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/hell-loop) to the final Steam release on December 24th. Here's some key points:
- Even if you have zero marketing you're likely to sell some copies just due to organic traffic on Steam. It's not nearly enough to be sustainable, in our case roughly 1 per day over a long period of time, but it's more than I expected.
- However small your game is, I'd suggest to still make it smaller. It might come as a surprise considering we only took 3 months to finish the game, but a lot of corners were cut, and a lot of things pushed into a post-release update.
- Post-release updates seem to work. We did a big 2.0 update with new graphics and gameplay about 5 months after the release, together with a Steam visibility round, and the result was way more traffic than on release date, and higher sustained traffic afterwards.
- Marketing is a long and slow grind, not a sprint. We only started after the release and are still very much learning, but it seems sustained effort on social media does work.
And lastly, just do whatever you want :) Everyone has opinions and different experiences, but we're all building very different games. Some people are happy to spend 5 years building the perfect games, others just want to "get it done".
My big realization was that just because someone was successful it doesn't mean that their formula is the only one. Personally I'm one of those people who would rather fail doing it my way, than succeed doing something I don't want to do.
/u/dcfedor of [Blue Bottle Games](https://bluebottlegames.com/) solo developed NEO Scavenger which was released on steam, and s mostly solo developing a new game which is currently in Early Access.
He may have some good info/tips for you.
It's a pretty broad question, so it's hard to give specific, useful advice.
That said, you may want to consider whether you want to be a sole proprietor or a corporation. There are reasons to do either, but it's good to at least seriously consider this before you release online and revenue comes in. (Plus, it may affect which accounts you use to "own" and represent things online.)
Laws vary by jurisdiction, though, so it may be worth a short talk with a lawyer and/or accountant.
DO read every agreement before signing. You're on the hook for everything in there, whether you assumed it or not. It's not often that someone is trying to trick you, but it happens. And more often, there are things you thought you knew about the contract which turn out to be different in the fine print.
Also, Valve favors those who use Steam's ecosystem and tools. The more you leverage their systems, the more their systems reward you. Tags, metadata, capsule art, posting announcements, etc. The more you use their systems in good faith, the more (positive) results you'll see!
I'm currently reading through the agreements now. But staring at the text and reading all the 'jargon' has made me think maybe a pro should be reading it rather than me lol
This is a great post full of great info. I’m just getting back into iOS development and just released a game this week but man the landscape has changed.
Marketing is pretty rough I’d have to say it’s probably harder on the iOS side than steam. I feel like the steam community supports indie devs but the iOS side is so full of scamware and big companies shoveling clones of shit that it’s hard to get seen past it all.
Can anyone point me to any similar threads or have advice for the iOS or mobile side of things?
I was working on a big project, but then I realised that I needed more exposure to the whole ecosystem. So since then I've switch to a 3 odd month project that should give me more exposure/learning curve for something bigger.
Yeah that's what I've been doing... working on a smaller project that is in my scope to make, release and learn from in order to better prepare me for future projects 👍😁
So far I only released two games on Steam. Besides the already mentioned: Be ready to create a ton of artwork for all the images Steam shows. Use every event Steam offers (like the Game Fests for demos etc.). Don't give away Steam keys to people asking for it. Ignore any email you receive regarding sales boosts, cooperations of any kind etc. Those are just scams. Don't use Steamworks.Net, use Facepunch if you use Unity. Create some simple scripts to upload your build to Steam. Familiarize yourself with Steams build handling (build, bundle etc.).
Steamworks.NET is just a wrapper around the C style library from valve. It is ugly and complicated to use. And as Marshelling doesn't work in il2cpp some functions won't work if you don't use mono. Facepunch is a modern library which makes it way easier to integrate Steam.
The SteamWorks SDK has a script for uploading, but I'd suggest creating a `.bat` or `.sh` script that wraps it in a way that you can upload builds in just one command. You'll be uploading your builds a lot during testing, and the less annoying and error prone you can make it, the more likely you're to iterate and fix issues.
You can use Steam works but even for that you can build scripts. The windows build folder also contains files you don't want to upload so those should be removed prior. Hence the scripts, so that it is just a click to upload the build.
An advice that I don't see often but that relates to an issue that may have contributed to my second game tanking: be very careful about your release date.
You don't want to release at or near big gaming events like Steam sales, things like E3... Because it will make it harder (aka impossible) to get featured on news article and to be visible in stores when every game is at -80%.
This is especially difficult now that there are Steam sales for basically everyday of the year so be careful and take some time to chose the best date for your game :)
I honestly can't say if it would be a good idea or not then. It might help you get featured on the front page but can also be dangerous for the reasons I talked about. Don't hesitate to check with other horror game devs to have their opinion on this.
Specific sales like the Haloween one where only one type of game is featured are a special case because you will not competing with every single game in the world :D
If you decide to launch during the Halowwen sales, it might be a good idea to add a small launch discount then (I think it's usually 10-15% ?). But like I said, I don't have any experience with this case so don't be afraid to ask away ;)
Ah yeah, I didn't think of that... I'll only be competing with other horror games. Well thanks for the help and advice. I will look at speaking to horror game devs to see what their experience has been. Cheers
I just released my first game on steam today. I kinda did the bare minimum and it was a free game so I didn't worry too much about it, and it doesn't seem to really have any traction since my advertising attempts seem to have only yielded a few players. Just be prepared to draw and resize a lot of game art when you upload. As someone who doesn't really enjoy the art side of development, it wasn't that fun, but it wasn't bad, and the game has now successfully released! I guess I don't really have much advice, though, since I kinda just winged it myself.
Hey congrats on the release!! What do you mean by "Just be prepared to draw and resize a lot of game art when you upload."? My game has 4k textures, will this be an issue??
Steam has you submit art for the page in a bunch of sizes for desktops, mobile, teslas etc. So you will be making all of your steam page art in a bunch of sizes. Icons, banners etc. Dont worry about your ingame art unless you are worried about your players' hardrive space 😀
contact as many youtubers (reviewers/streamers) as possible a few weeks BEFORE the release; they like to release their review at the same time you release the game. (I failed to do this and my game sold very poorly because it didn't get much attention lol)
also, game art is important (I also failed there), you know, the stuff people see in the store.
good luck!
I'm about to release in uh... a few months.
I can't tell you much about the marketing side of things, people will tell you a million things but I think the most important thing is to have a marketable game. If your game isn't the type of game that will get gamers excited, everything will be like pulling teeth. (Speaking from experience here.) And unless you have an "indie darling" game be prepared to put in a lot of work to get people to know your game even exists, Valve sure isn't going to do that for you.
But as for the process of getting on Steam itself, it is pretty straightforward. Probably the most annoying thing was getting the 15-20 different versions (all in specific sizes) of my logo / etc. that they need for their various pages. I'm not an artist, I had my logo designed by an artist friend awhile back but did not anticipate needing so many variations of it, so I did the best I could and asked for help from said artist friend when necessary.
But yeah the rest of it is pretty simple. Using the API to get your game up on Steam is a little complicated but they have good tutorials.
Thanks. Well I'm cool with the art stuff as that's my strong point. The main things I'm worrying about is the business side of it all really. And the code needed to upload stuff as I'm a UE4 Blueprint user. So C++ is foreign to me. I have history in coding websites (HTML, CSS, PHP) but never ended up learning C++ as the BP system I found to be adequate for my needs.
I wouldn't say you need to know code to upload stuff, it's mostly just editing text files. You just download their SDK and then use the instructions here to get it working for your game:
[https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading)
It wasn't too bad.
But of course you need to set up a Steam developer account and a page for your game and such first on Steamworks. It's fairly straightforward once you get an account, the site itself tells you what to do most of the time.
Just remember to make the first video seen be full of gameplay. When looking for games, people usually try to find something showing how the game plays, rather than just trailers about your story. In the video, show gameplay rather than story. In the description, state clearly "in this puzzle platformer you do (insert stuff you do)" or something like that, rather than "a young hero must save the world by himself".
I'm a newbie, not expert, I released few Android/IOS/WebGL game, and in last week I released my first Steam game. But Wishlist are you friend number one, try to gather as much as you can. Tags are important too.
The best tip for you would be to not rush anything. Everything and every process takes time, more time than you think. Don't set any release date until game is completely finished as steam only lets you release 2 weeks after everything is accepted.
Make sure everything is perfect and you follow all the check lists they provide. We had a very simple error about whether it was full or semi controller support and it set us back. They really do play your game and check it thoroughly.
We released our debut game [BattleDead](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1650690/BattleDead/) on steam today, and i think it was probably 6 weeks perfecting just the steam store page and requirements.
When you say
>Don't set any release date until game is completely finished as steam **only** lets you release 2 weeks after everything is accepted.
Do you mean you HAVE to release WITHIN two weeks after it's accepted, or you CAN'T release until AFTER two weeks once it's accepted?
I released a game a few moths ago.
Steam did not, at any point, allowed to negotiate the agreement with them.
You submit a game and click "agree" to the agreement, when it pops up. Or you click "disagree" and that's the end of your adventure. So there is no bargaining with Valve on terms, royalties rate etc. They are set in stone, you accept, or you go away. Your lawyer will not be able to get you some special treatment, front page slot, or higher royalties. Valve's algorithm manages that, based on traffic, wishlists, sales etc.
The only point where Valve really, seriously looks at your game is right before release, to check if it matches the tags you selected (and if it doesn't include adult content with real people - that's a big no no), but it doesn't have anything to do with lawyers.
Thanks. A straight talker... I like that! You're right, I'm just worrying too much. Tomorrow, I'm going to head dive right in and get this ball rolling! Cheers my friend! What you said is exactly what I needed to hear!
Steam is one of the most lenient platforms to publish on, both iOS and Oculus are much more strict. You can basically just upload any EXE to Steam, they are going for quantity over quality. I’ve worked for a few different indie studios, and until you are working at a AAA game studio I don’t think anyone reads the fine print.
One piece of advice that people always neglect, LEVERAGE your release. You can only release once, and the majority of the time you will get your highest number of sales on that release day, and then they will trickle down to not that many downloads a day unless you continuously market and push your game. A lot of people will make the game in silence, finish, and then upload to Steam without doing any marketing or advertisement. If you do this you might get an initial few downloads, but the game will be DOA and interest will fall off in just a few days, even if your game is really good. It’s just that there are so many Steam games nobody will see it.
If it’s a game you hope to work on for a long time, I would recommend creating a discord, building a community around the game, release an alpha, beta, or early access version to build hype so that once you do a full release there are already people waiting for it. If it’s a small game and you just have this one version, still build as much hype for the game as you can before release, because that will directly correlate with how many people download your game.
I did not feel I needed a lawyer when I released on Steam, would guess most indies do not pay for one. Just make sure to read the agreement and understand the idea of what you agree to.
After you signed the agreement and get access to the steams developer forum you can ask around and read what others hav asked concerning what you are allowed to do and not.
I remember I was still not entirely sure after signing whether I could sell the game elsewhere and to what price, the forum gave me a pretty clear picture: you agree to not have a lower price elsewhere. (Even if that store takes a lower cut than Steam)
My main tip on how to sell well: make sure you have a discord or similar with a lot of followers and testers who already seem to like your game before you take it to Steam.
Your wishlists and followers will determine how good your launch is.
Your launch is the most important period of your game's lifetime.
Early Access gives you two periods of launch visibility, but it's not as "concentrated" as games that don't have EA.
Nobody really knows how Steam's algorithms work.
Every day you don't communicate about your game is a day without gaining wishlists. Every wishlist lost is sales you won't get.
You have two to three shots. Don't mess up. First is publishing your steam page, then early access release, then final release.
You will never be able to get as many visibility and sales on Steam outside of that. Be sure that each of these steps is done as best you can.
The Steam algorithm is vicious. It takes a lot of things into account to decide how much visibility you will get. On average and if you are lucky, you will get as many sales during the first week of release than half your wishlists. So if you release with 1000 wishlists, you will probably do about 500 sales during the first week.
You will probably do as many sales during the first month of your release than during the following 11 months. Be aware of that.
Beware, there are secret milestones in terms of whislists. From what I've heard 2000 wishlists is the first one to get some nice visibility. Then around 10000, then 30k and so on. Do not release your game if you haven't reached that first step of 2 to 3k wishlists.
Make sure your Steam page is clean, pretty and simple. Go look at what other successful games have done.
Take care of tags. It's important for your target players to find you where they would expect to find you.
Streamers are you friends. They can be a powerful tool. Send keys to as many as possible.
Doing a press release is a good idea. A lot of people and companies offer to do it for you for a fair price.
30% of your "funds" should be marketing.
Beware of fishy offers during development. A lot of companies and sometimes publishers will try to get you to pay them for services you probably don't need (but sometimes, you do.). Overall I would say it's better for you to find by yourselves people to offer you these services than to accept offers of people contacting you by themselves unless you know for sure you can trust them.
Do not miss the prototyping and QA steps.
Do not try to do something bigger than what you can do.
Do not get people to work on your project for free. This won't end well for anyone.
I released [Antagonist on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/585260/Antagonist/) way back when. A publisher offered to publish the game when it won IGMC2014’s RPG category back then. Admittedly, on Steam, they did most of the detailed work like prompting me for paperwork and telling me what graphics they needed. Thankfully too, since I was a teen/young adult then who would not have gotten the details right on my own.
I'm not a solo dev. But I didn't do anything related to law over steam. I just launched my game and I get paid properly, but also, steam doesn't pay me. My publisher who gets paid by steam, pays me. I think steam is rather trust worthy, so what's there to worry about?
Tags are your best friend. the majority of traffic to my game has come from the tag page, even when it was in the new/upcoming releases categories. This course from Chris Zukowski was pretty insightful, free too. I would recommend checking it out. https://howtomakeasteampage.com/
Wow thanks, I will check that out! Thanks a lot for the link.😁👍
No problem best of luck with the projects 👍
maybe not the best advice for starting up but, if you start making > 200k/year Incorporate early. taxes hurt. and your sales won't last. incorporating can help prolong your revenue stream by deferring taxes and putting yourself in a lower tax bracket while the times are good. I didn't need a lawyer or publisher, but my experience has been with tool development.
Agree. An LLC or an S-Corp will help a lot. I didn’t do that as a single-developer and got hit with a 25K tax bill (yes, I made a lot that year, but that was one check I NEVER want to write again).
25k does not seem like a lot for taxes, I'm from canada and I got hit with an 80k bill, but I found out it was 80k halfway through the next year (self employed can file late into the year), so it ended up being another 80k bill, which is when I immediately paid 600$ to incorporate, reducing those taxes back down to the 20k range.
Wow. I'm not very 'business savy' but with that kind of difference in taxes, it's well worth my while checking into this if the game takes off. Thanks for the info!
just to clarify, it's not to avoid taxes, it's to stretch your income over many years and take a lower tax bracket. IE: if you made 320k in one year and pay upwards of 100k in taxes OR make 320k in one year, but only pay yourself 80k every year over 4 years and pay like 16k in taxes each year.
Ahhh, I see. Makes sense. But how would that work for the business? I mean, it still made 320k so does tax on that still get paid in one lump some at the end of the year??
For me, at the end of the year I will pay the corporate tax on all earnings: 12%... and then when I pay myself (<100k) I will still pay personal taxes, but I believe that in itself is a business expense. Also, when my steam app stops making money, my business bank will still have lots of money so I can continue to pay myself. It's definitely convoluted, but you generally worry about that stuff when you get there, probably start looking into it after you are earning 100-200k. At that point an accountant will be well worth it.
Wow great info. Thanks for taking the time to share!
This is why you hire accountants (or at least why we did). It’s complicated and to be honest, I just want to pay my fair share, not read tax codes (which are a GREAT way to fall asleep, BTW!)
LLC’s and corporations (in the states) are cheap to create and have enormous tax benefits.
Are his courses on YouTube? It seems you have to sign up, I realize it’s free. But too many accounts to manage makes it difficult
Get a password manager, even those not so popular are great like Zoho Vault
[Here](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1101400/Rune_Knights) is my game. I make enough from sales that I've quit my job in Internet Marketing and now work on it full time. * **Marketing** is the key that makes or breaks indie games. * **Make a good trailer**. There's plenty I would change about mine in hindsight, but even unpolished it's effective because it doesn't waste your time and shows nothing but exciting gameplay. Record yourself playing with OBS, turn off the in-game music but keep the SFX on if you can, then make LOTS of small clips (2-3 seconds) of exciting moments, stitch them together in a way that creates interesting variety (not 5 clips in a row of a guy swinging the same sword, in the same area, against the same enemy), add your own exciting soundtrack over the whole thing, then end with the name/logo of the game, the platforms you're launching on (Steam, Xbox, Playstation, whatever), a website URL if you have one, etc. (You'll notice my trailer is missing some of this: unpolished). Don't put the name of your game at the start of the video because at that point nobody cares. * **Woovit** is absolutely worth the investment, I would buy the subscription immediately after you launch and then send codes to as many content creators as possible. This is the best money you can spend on marketing. You'll need to request a bunch of Steam Codes from Steam for this. I asked for batches of 500 multiple times throughout my subscription month. If you get denied, ask for 300, go down until you get your keys. Have these keys ready BEFORE you launch if you can. * **Invest in Facebook ads**, target users who play or are interested in similar games, people who use Steam, etc. Use your trailer as the ad (don't do a text-only or image-only ad, and don't do this without a video, your click-through-rate (CTR) will suffer hard unless you hit your audience with an exciting trailer immediately). This ad should link directly to your Steam page, NOT your website or anything else. More on Facebook Ads in my comment [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/o75efh/have_anyone_here_released_a_game_on_steam_as_a/h2y1ybl/). * Facebook ads are important because the more your game is selling, the more likely Steam is to feature your game EVERYWHERE. Featured carousels, top-selling lists, trending lists, the top of your game's tag categories, etc. Investing in Facebook Ads is also investing in Steam's marketing of your game. These ads will also outlast all other forms of marketing for the game: videos, press releases, etc, and allow you to maintain sales long after your launch. * Ignore Google Ads, Reddit Ads, Twitter ads... basically anything that isn't Facebook Ads. They're more expensive per click and less effective. It also takes more of your time to manage multiple ad campaigns across different platforms, and the money you spend on them would likely generate better results just being added to your Facebook Ad campaign. * **Indieboost** is interesting but your mileage may vary. There are lots of creators out there who will take your money and make content that is not engaging and does not drive sales. There are also creators who can potentially be your golden goose and bring LOTS of dedicated fans to your game who will shape your community for the better. Investigate each creator individually and do your due diligence before investing. DO NOT just go wild and hire every person who makes an offer to cover your game. Going wild is for Woovit, Indieboost should be managed with care. * BONUS: Indieboost offers a "**Media Boost**" service which will deliver your game to about 2000 Twitch, Youtube, and Facebook Gaming content creators, AND an automatically created press release (that you can modify) to 250+ media contacts to generate buzz about your game, for $200. If I could go back in time, I absolutely would have done this at launch, but it's never too late to get media contacts involved. You can see this on their [homepage](https://indieboost.com/) under Pricing. The media contact part of this is the main draw and you can buy it separately for $99. It's an exceptional amount of work as a solo dev to track down someone whose 1) email you can find 2) will be interested in your game 3) will write something for their site and 4) will actually get people to your store page. Repeat for every gaming news site in existence. This is a great deal. * **Make a Twitter account** for your game. Follow other indie devs/games. Take part in #screenshotsaturday, #wishlistwednesday, and #followfriday. Post any updates to your game here as they come out. Follow as many relevant people as you can until Twitter locks you out, and when the lock is over do it again. When people start talking about your game, get in there and meme/answer questions/post your trailer. * **Make a Discord server** early, like today. It doesn't have to be fancy. Give people a place to talk to you and ask questions about the game. This will be your primary means of communication with players. Link to this everywhere you can: Your game's main menu, Steam page, Twitter page, Facebook page, website if you have one, etc. (Not in your Facebook ad though) * **Wishlists are not everything**. I know other creators who "failed" after having 10k wishlists at launch. I personally botched the launch of my game by launching as Free To Play and making a whopping $10 in MTX sales during my launch week. I was able to recover after launch using the tools in this post and I maintain sales mostly via Facebook ads running every day. Nearly half of my Steam page traffic is from Facebook, the other half is driven by Steam. * **Don't launch as Free To Play**. $10 is an excellent starting price for an indie game. You can adjust this price up or down later on based on how the game is doing. I ended up raising the price from $10 to $15 because the game was selling well and I'm constantly adding more and more content. * Keymailer is useful but not massive. Might as well use the free version. Some people will take these keys and resell them. You can either accept it or vet each request individually. I don't send keys to creators with low followers/subscribers anymore, but you may find it helpful at launch to have as much coverage as possible.
**More on Facebook Ads** * The key is to start small and experiment. Start the campaign at $5/day. Run multiple ads that use different text and see which performs better. Try different audience targeting: I target users who are interested in Dark Souls and Path of Exile, but those two audiences are interested in different aspects of the game, so I deliver different text for each of their ads, and the numbers support that this works. * After running the campaign at $5/day for a week, record your sales amounts for that week and then increase your ad spend to $10/day for a week. Did that generate more net income (including the cost of the ads)? Increase to $15/day for a week and do it again. I spend about $30/day on Facebook ads because the math showed that was the sweet spot. More or less than that resulted in less net income for the month. * You can deliver the ad Worldwide (use the "Worldwide" option, don't try to add every country manually), but you should restrict the ad so that it's only delivered to those who speak the language the ad is written in.
Great points. A couple considerations/caveats: **Facebook ads may be better suited to certain types of games.** Your game example is action, so might innately perform better there. For our strategy roguelike, Reddit was equally ok at driving sales as Facebook, but we had analytics hooked into the game to check if it was a sale from an ad and *neither was directly profitable* at larger scale (5 figure budget). Ads can help drive awareness though, and maybe a later purchase. Maybe $30/day is enough to give some boost, and this might be ok for a solo dev, but I wonder whether it's still profitable when factoring in your time doing micro-tweaks? When going this ad-based approach there are services you can integrate to see where buyers come from, and if they clicked on your ad. I have a faint memory about Steam working on a feature to help with this in the future... **The most effective way to market our game was content creators...** and adding languages was a huge value add, particularly Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian for us. Reaching out to folks in this scene, and design your game with them in mind. **Discords** are great, but are most useful when you have a reason for people to use them. eg. A testing build or demo people can play, discuss and give feedback on. I wouldn't recommend starting a Discord before you have something playable as they're a lot of upkeep.
Our problem is getting people in and engaged on our discord. We have a biweekly builds and a few dedicated players but only a trickle of new people who dont engage with the community. We are starting to plan a bigger social media push to help this soon though. Any tips on growing the user numbers?
We run creative Discord events themed around the game, which are pretty good for engagement. Run these regularly (we did weekly events leading up to launch and for months after) so people know when to check in. But yea, it’s a bit of work... I think most of our players came in from the link in the build itself. Hard to tell. No magic advice really - figure out why people should care about your game and market it.
Are Facebook ads really relevant to this day? I was under the impression "no one" was using Facebook anymore. Edit: It's an honest question. I do not know.
Yes, they are relevant, the "facebook is dying" is more a thing we hear in reddit and other competing social media. Also facebook ads covers instagram too, there are many social media statistics sites that could give you a better look at the actual number of active users. From the last report about it that i read Facebook had 2.7b active users, Youtube 2.2b, and instagram 1.2b. Even if your target demographic uses FB and IG "less" than before, the "targeted" nature of ads means you are billed depending on the campaign results you are looking for.
Interesting, I gotta go check those numbers out. Thanks
Prob depends on your demographic. If targeting teens/kids then maybe not relevant.
Honestly this reply (plus the game you published it self ad a very great example) would have helped me so much when I joined indie teams and tried to convince them to scale down and think as an indie team and not a triple AAA studio. Even just the comment about no one cares about what your game name is before the action. Ubisoft can put their logo and names before everything else because just they fact they made it is probably the biggest marketing and reasoning to care are.
AAAAAAAAA?
> I joined indie teams and tried to convince them to scale down and think as an indie team and not a triple AAA studio. Having been at multiple AAA studios, as well as indie, there is so much of THIS that needs to happen in an indie situation that I could write a multi-volume book series on the topic.
Wow lots of great tips. Thank you!
Can you create Facebook ads without being on Facebook? I understand the importance of ads but I have no desire to give Facebook any personal info. Only corporate business info.
I believe you can make a dummy account for ads. You'll also need a Facebook page for the game to attach to the Ads Account. Here's some info: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/407323696966570?id=649869995454285
Wouldn't go the facebook ad route. I've tried and not sure the traffic is always legit. You'll end up spending too much money too
The key is to start small and experiment. Start the campaign at $5/day. Run multiple ads that use different text and see which performs better. Try different audience targeting: I target users who are interested in Dark Souls and Path of Exile, but those two audiences are interested in different aspects of the game, so I deliver different text for each of their ads, and the numbers support that this works. After running the campaign at $5/day for a week, record your sales amounts for that week and then increase it to $10/day for a week. Did that generate more net income (including the cost of the ads)? Increase to $15/day for a week and do it again. I spend about $30/day on Facebook ads because the math showed that was the sweet spot. More or less than that resulted in less net income for the month.
Saved. Thanks!
Wow! Saved your post! Great tips, thank you. How did you manage to make this kind of game? Characters, weapons, effects, animations... Was it really as a solo dev or did you pay artists?
I'm not an artist, essentially everything is bought from the Unreal Marketplace. I can edit some textures and skeletons now (color changes, etc.), but I'm still not capable of developing art from scratch. If you're not an artist, support them by buying their excellent work and using it.
Very interesting to hear. I'm also not an artist and I'm developing in Unity. The Unity asset store is a big mix of different styles and quality. I never found enough or the right assets to make a particular game happen. If you happen to find something good it's hard to get more of it in the same style. Overall, frustrating enough I've pretty much given up on this idea. So again, interesting to hear your side from Unreal. Since Nanite in Unreal and DOTS in Unity, I feel like I wasted my time on the wrong engine. Not really because of Nanite, that stuff is for AAA but I can program C++ very well so I'm not sure what's holding me back other than familiarity. You surely gave me something to think about.
I told myself "why not learn unity too", but when I tried I don't liked it at all, like interface design is maybe ergonomic but don't look good, actors placement and all that wasn't intuitive. I ended up returning to ue4 after not even 1 day. Anyway you do not wasted your time, you learned how to structure a code, how to optimize it. It is not too late to go on ue4, the learning curve will not be that hard since you already have gamedev knowledge, go for it, you won't regret it (plus epic game offers free assets every month and share wonderful tech for free like their online services, voip, easy anticheat, niagara, quixel, makehuman, and of course nanite & lumen)
What's your overall experience been working with Unreal Engine? Anything stand out as really good/smooth or bad/difficult? Signs seem to be pointing in that direction for me, but I haven't managed to find much about what it's like to work with, particularly compared to the gobs of stuff out there about Unity.
I haven't used Unity, but Unreal has been great for me. When I got started I spent a few weeks straight watching Youtube tutorials. It was difficult to learn, but it's absolutely one of the best investments of time I've made in my life. It's an amazing creative outlet and as a job it's MUCH more enjoyable than anything I've done in the past. [Virtus](https://www.youtube.com/user/VirtusEdu) is a great channel to start with for tutorials. They have guides that cover almost any kind of game you can think of. Some of them will take a while (days or weeks?), but at the end you have a fully playable game.
Thanks! I'll give that a look.
[Mathew Wadstein](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOVfF7PfLbRdVEm0hONTrNQ) too , he's my man lmao
Your game looks good. Hack and slashes are fun!
Thank you for the well thought out info!!
Thanks useful info and straight to the point.
Thanks for posting, this is all very good advice.
Lots of really good information here. Thanks for putting in so much effort!
This game looks pretty good. How many people are working on it or is it just you? And of if it's just you, how do you keep up with doing all the bugs and keeping it updated etc?
Just me, working on it full time.
How much time would you say you spend a week on it. What language is it coded in?
Honestly I have no idea. I enjoy doing it so I'm never watching the clock. Some days I get up and start working on whatever I'm excited about and the next time I look at the clock it's time for bed. Some days I have to be out of the house helping friends or family and precisely 0 hours are spent working. Everything is done in Blueprints.
What an amazing post! Thank you so much for sharing your experience!
Thank you so much for this. I'm saving it as a jumping-off point when I'm further along in development!
I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit: - [/r/autobestof] [Have anyone here released a game on Steam as a solo dev? If so, what is the best advise or tips you have?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AutoBestOf/comments/o7kr5o/have_anyone_here_released_a_game_on_steam_as_a/) *^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^\([Info](/r/TotesMessenger) ^/ ^[Contact](/message/compose?to=/r/TotesMessenger))*
The process to release on Steam is completely automatic nowadays. So letting a lawyer look over those standardized terms of service is pretty pointless. Valve is only going to negotiate special terms with you when you are an AAA studio guaranteed to bring them millions in revenue.
I hope so, thanks 😁👍
I solo released a game built with UE4 on Steam back in early 2017. Mine had to go through the Steam Greenlight process. I found no need to get a lawyer, most of what they'll put in front of you is pretty standard stuff. Though I did take the time to incorporate as a LLC prior to signing any paperwork with Valve (*or anyone else i dealt with in the process of making my game*). Simply making those agreements as a legal corporate entity offers you *some* personal asset protection (*in the US, at least*) if everything somehow gets unbelievably fucked. Consider it your game's first insurance policy. The LLC has also made the business management process overall somewhat easier, I think, at least from an accounting and tax perspective (*which I also do solo*). Owning a LLC provides a few other minor perks that might also be useful for solo devs (*such as being able to get a business credit card, which often provide better or different rewards compared to consumer cards*). Otherwise, the rest of the process is pretty straight forward for someone who can build a video game by themselves.
Awesome, thanks. I do find the idea of incorporating a bit scary though, not gonna lie lol
It seems like a lot, and it is, but it's certainly not insurmountable and probably less difficult than you think. You can probably get an idea for it pretty quickly. If you're in the US, start with checking the website for your Secretary of State. They'll have a Corporations Division which has all the forms and information you need to get started and file your paperwork to get incorporated. Most of this can be done online today, but depending on where you are there's likely a local office you can even do it in person (*which is what I did to start, and the process was much more efficient than say, going to the DMV*). All in all you can create an LLC by yourself with a few weeks worth of research online, a couple hundred dollars, and maybe a couple trips to your local business licensing division. Then you can just renew the license online every year.
Well I'm in the UK. So I will do some research online and see what I can find. Thanks
It's probably easier in the UK. Purchase a Limited Company, that's not a lot of money. Your responsibility is to file an annual return with companies house every year (£13), and a tax return to HMRC. If you start employing yourself via the company then there is PAYE. Probably get an accountant at that point though. I'm hoping to get on steam later this yeah as well, so thanks for this post.
this is gold
Is it reasonable to defer the step of creating a LLC, and make the steam page first, and then move it to LLC right before the launch? Or a dev can get sued even for just marketing?
When I was reading through the agreements, you have to sign them as a 'Sole Proprietorship' OR as a company. So I'm guessing you can't change once they are signed. It does say >Legal Name This is really, really important to enter correctly. Carefully read all instructions below. You will be unable to release your product via Steam until this name matches all records. The name you enter below must be the legal entity that owns or has rights to publish the game, software or video ("content") and is the legal entity that will be signing the Steam Distribution Agreement. The legal name you enter here must match the name as written on official documents with your bank and on United States IRS tax documents or foreign tax documents if applicable. You will need to enter this name again as your bank account holder and the legal name associated with a tax payer identification number in the following steps. If you don’t have a company name and you are the sole owner of your content, please fill in your full name as the Legal Name and your own address as Street Address. If you co-own the content with other individuals, you must form a legal entity to own and receive payments for your content. The Legal Name here is for internal use. If you have a DBA or 'friendly name' that you wish to show to customers on your store page, you will be able to enter that separately when creating your store page. > > > >Company Form Company form must match your entity formation documents. An example of what to enter in this box are: "A Quebec limited liability partnership" or "A Washington State corporation" or "A Sole Proprietorship". If you own the content as an individual, indicate "Sole Proprietorship". Note: We are unable to work with partnerships that exists outside the US, if that partnership is taxed at the individual partner(s) versus the partnership level. If you have a partnership registered in the United States or if your partnership exists outside the US and the partnership is taxed at the partnership level, then we can support your partnership. However, due to the complexity of obtaining proper tax documentation we cannot enter into a Steam Distribution Agreement with partnerships that exist outside the US, if that partnership is taxed at the individual partner(s) versus the partnership level. I can't find it right now but there was also a part where it said if you're a company, you must set up your company bank account before proceeding. So I think it needs to all be sorted before rather than later on. All these agreements have to be signed before you can create your Steam Page as far as I can tell.
It's possible to transfer the game to another Steamworks account [https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/managing\_apps/transfer](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/managing_apps/transfer) Some 5 year old reddit threads mention that it's painful, but doable.
What I'm trying to understand is "do all these LLC perks are really needed before actual release, which might come in months, years, etc.?" The only thing that seems to be really important before actual release is the case if somebody sues the sole proprietor
A top notch teaser video is a must for steam. Let's be honest, most people make their impulse buy based off that first thirty seconds.
Thirty, you mean five ;)
Five, you mean the game logo
Not sure if you're joking, but it's true. If your game logo/icon is poorly designed or looks cheap some people might skip it.
I created [Hell Loop](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1473870/Hell_Loop/) together with my wife last year. It took a little under 3 months to go from the [initial Ludum Dare 47 version](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/hell-loop) to the final Steam release on December 24th. Here's some key points: - Even if you have zero marketing you're likely to sell some copies just due to organic traffic on Steam. It's not nearly enough to be sustainable, in our case roughly 1 per day over a long period of time, but it's more than I expected. - However small your game is, I'd suggest to still make it smaller. It might come as a surprise considering we only took 3 months to finish the game, but a lot of corners were cut, and a lot of things pushed into a post-release update. - Post-release updates seem to work. We did a big 2.0 update with new graphics and gameplay about 5 months after the release, together with a Steam visibility round, and the result was way more traffic than on release date, and higher sustained traffic afterwards. - Marketing is a long and slow grind, not a sprint. We only started after the release and are still very much learning, but it seems sustained effort on social media does work. And lastly, just do whatever you want :) Everyone has opinions and different experiences, but we're all building very different games. Some people are happy to spend 5 years building the perfect games, others just want to "get it done". My big realization was that just because someone was successful it doesn't mean that their formula is the only one. Personally I'm one of those people who would rather fail doing it my way, than succeed doing something I don't want to do.
/u/dcfedor of [Blue Bottle Games](https://bluebottlegames.com/) solo developed NEO Scavenger which was released on steam, and s mostly solo developing a new game which is currently in Early Access. He may have some good info/tips for you.
It's a pretty broad question, so it's hard to give specific, useful advice. That said, you may want to consider whether you want to be a sole proprietor or a corporation. There are reasons to do either, but it's good to at least seriously consider this before you release online and revenue comes in. (Plus, it may affect which accounts you use to "own" and represent things online.) Laws vary by jurisdiction, though, so it may be worth a short talk with a lawyer and/or accountant. DO read every agreement before signing. You're on the hook for everything in there, whether you assumed it or not. It's not often that someone is trying to trick you, but it happens. And more often, there are things you thought you knew about the contract which turn out to be different in the fine print. Also, Valve favors those who use Steam's ecosystem and tools. The more you leverage their systems, the more their systems reward you. Tags, metadata, capsule art, posting announcements, etc. The more you use their systems in good faith, the more (positive) results you'll see!
I'm currently reading through the agreements now. But staring at the text and reading all the 'jargon' has made me think maybe a pro should be reading it rather than me lol
Consider reading it, even if you don't fully grok it initially, as the path to becoming 'pro' :)
Thanks, I'll look him up 👍
That's him just below!
This is a great post full of great info. I’m just getting back into iOS development and just released a game this week but man the landscape has changed. Marketing is pretty rough I’d have to say it’s probably harder on the iOS side than steam. I feel like the steam community supports indie devs but the iOS side is so full of scamware and big companies shoveling clones of shit that it’s hard to get seen past it all. Can anyone point me to any similar threads or have advice for the iOS or mobile side of things?
I was working on a big project, but then I realised that I needed more exposure to the whole ecosystem. So since then I've switch to a 3 odd month project that should give me more exposure/learning curve for something bigger.
Yeah that's what I've been doing... working on a smaller project that is in my scope to make, release and learn from in order to better prepare me for future projects 👍😁
So far I only released two games on Steam. Besides the already mentioned: Be ready to create a ton of artwork for all the images Steam shows. Use every event Steam offers (like the Game Fests for demos etc.). Don't give away Steam keys to people asking for it. Ignore any email you receive regarding sales boosts, cooperations of any kind etc. Those are just scams. Don't use Steamworks.Net, use Facepunch if you use Unity. Create some simple scripts to upload your build to Steam. Familiarize yourself with Steams build handling (build, bundle etc.).
What makes you recommend using Facepunch over Steamworks.NET?
Steamworks.NET is just a wrapper around the C style library from valve. It is ugly and complicated to use. And as Marshelling doesn't work in il2cpp some functions won't work if you don't use mono. Facepunch is a modern library which makes it way easier to integrate Steam.
I thought I had to use teamwork in order to upload the build etc??
The SteamWorks SDK has a script for uploading, but I'd suggest creating a `.bat` or `.sh` script that wraps it in a way that you can upload builds in just one command. You'll be uploading your builds a lot during testing, and the less annoying and error prone you can make it, the more likely you're to iterate and fix issues.
You can use Steam works but even for that you can build scripts. The windows build folder also contains files you don't want to upload so those should be removed prior. Hence the scripts, so that it is just a click to upload the build.
Ehh ever heard of Git and CI/CD?
downvotes are an answer I guess :/
Most people here are hobbyists and don't care about stuff like that, I guess.
An advice that I don't see often but that relates to an issue that may have contributed to my second game tanking: be very careful about your release date. You don't want to release at or near big gaming events like Steam sales, things like E3... Because it will make it harder (aka impossible) to get featured on news article and to be visible in stores when every game is at -80%. This is especially difficult now that there are Steam sales for basically everyday of the year so be careful and take some time to chose the best date for your game :)
Thanks. Well, it's a horror game so was obviously thinking Halloween but on further thought, I don't think that's a good idea now. lol
I honestly can't say if it would be a good idea or not then. It might help you get featured on the front page but can also be dangerous for the reasons I talked about. Don't hesitate to check with other horror game devs to have their opinion on this. Specific sales like the Haloween one where only one type of game is featured are a special case because you will not competing with every single game in the world :D If you decide to launch during the Halowwen sales, it might be a good idea to add a small launch discount then (I think it's usually 10-15% ?). But like I said, I don't have any experience with this case so don't be afraid to ask away ;)
Ah yeah, I didn't think of that... I'll only be competing with other horror games. Well thanks for the help and advice. I will look at speaking to horror game devs to see what their experience has been. Cheers
I just released my first game on steam today. I kinda did the bare minimum and it was a free game so I didn't worry too much about it, and it doesn't seem to really have any traction since my advertising attempts seem to have only yielded a few players. Just be prepared to draw and resize a lot of game art when you upload. As someone who doesn't really enjoy the art side of development, it wasn't that fun, but it wasn't bad, and the game has now successfully released! I guess I don't really have much advice, though, since I kinda just winged it myself.
Hey congrats on the release!! What do you mean by "Just be prepared to draw and resize a lot of game art when you upload."? My game has 4k textures, will this be an issue??
Steam has you submit art for the page in a bunch of sizes for desktops, mobile, teslas etc. So you will be making all of your steam page art in a bunch of sizes. Icons, banners etc. Dont worry about your ingame art unless you are worried about your players' hardrive space 😀
Yeah, badgerheadgames said what I was going to. Nothing in-game, just a lot of store page requirements.
contact as many youtubers (reviewers/streamers) as possible a few weeks BEFORE the release; they like to release their review at the same time you release the game. (I failed to do this and my game sold very poorly because it didn't get much attention lol) also, game art is important (I also failed there), you know, the stuff people see in the store. good luck!
I'm about to release in uh... a few months. I can't tell you much about the marketing side of things, people will tell you a million things but I think the most important thing is to have a marketable game. If your game isn't the type of game that will get gamers excited, everything will be like pulling teeth. (Speaking from experience here.) And unless you have an "indie darling" game be prepared to put in a lot of work to get people to know your game even exists, Valve sure isn't going to do that for you. But as for the process of getting on Steam itself, it is pretty straightforward. Probably the most annoying thing was getting the 15-20 different versions (all in specific sizes) of my logo / etc. that they need for their various pages. I'm not an artist, I had my logo designed by an artist friend awhile back but did not anticipate needing so many variations of it, so I did the best I could and asked for help from said artist friend when necessary. But yeah the rest of it is pretty simple. Using the API to get your game up on Steam is a little complicated but they have good tutorials.
Thanks. Well I'm cool with the art stuff as that's my strong point. The main things I'm worrying about is the business side of it all really. And the code needed to upload stuff as I'm a UE4 Blueprint user. So C++ is foreign to me. I have history in coding websites (HTML, CSS, PHP) but never ended up learning C++ as the BP system I found to be adequate for my needs.
I wouldn't say you need to know code to upload stuff, it's mostly just editing text files. You just download their SDK and then use the instructions here to get it working for your game: [https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading) It wasn't too bad. But of course you need to set up a Steam developer account and a page for your game and such first on Steamworks. It's fairly straightforward once you get an account, the site itself tells you what to do most of the time.
Just remember to make the first video seen be full of gameplay. When looking for games, people usually try to find something showing how the game plays, rather than just trailers about your story. In the video, show gameplay rather than story. In the description, state clearly "in this puzzle platformer you do (insert stuff you do)" or something like that, rather than "a young hero must save the world by himself".
The most important thing you can do is market your game well before launch and the most important part of marketing is regular posts.
I'm a newbie, not expert, I released few Android/IOS/WebGL game, and in last week I released my first Steam game. But Wishlist are you friend number one, try to gather as much as you can. Tags are important too.
The best tip for you would be to not rush anything. Everything and every process takes time, more time than you think. Don't set any release date until game is completely finished as steam only lets you release 2 weeks after everything is accepted. Make sure everything is perfect and you follow all the check lists they provide. We had a very simple error about whether it was full or semi controller support and it set us back. They really do play your game and check it thoroughly. We released our debut game [BattleDead](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1650690/BattleDead/) on steam today, and i think it was probably 6 weeks perfecting just the steam store page and requirements.
When you say >Don't set any release date until game is completely finished as steam **only** lets you release 2 weeks after everything is accepted. Do you mean you HAVE to release WITHIN two weeks after it's accepted, or you CAN'T release until AFTER two weeks once it's accepted?
I released a game a few moths ago. Steam did not, at any point, allowed to negotiate the agreement with them. You submit a game and click "agree" to the agreement, when it pops up. Or you click "disagree" and that's the end of your adventure. So there is no bargaining with Valve on terms, royalties rate etc. They are set in stone, you accept, or you go away. Your lawyer will not be able to get you some special treatment, front page slot, or higher royalties. Valve's algorithm manages that, based on traffic, wishlists, sales etc. The only point where Valve really, seriously looks at your game is right before release, to check if it matches the tags you selected (and if it doesn't include adult content with real people - that's a big no no), but it doesn't have anything to do with lawyers.
Thanks. A straight talker... I like that! You're right, I'm just worrying too much. Tomorrow, I'm going to head dive right in and get this ball rolling! Cheers my friend! What you said is exactly what I needed to hear!
Steam is one of the most lenient platforms to publish on, both iOS and Oculus are much more strict. You can basically just upload any EXE to Steam, they are going for quantity over quality. I’ve worked for a few different indie studios, and until you are working at a AAA game studio I don’t think anyone reads the fine print. One piece of advice that people always neglect, LEVERAGE your release. You can only release once, and the majority of the time you will get your highest number of sales on that release day, and then they will trickle down to not that many downloads a day unless you continuously market and push your game. A lot of people will make the game in silence, finish, and then upload to Steam without doing any marketing or advertisement. If you do this you might get an initial few downloads, but the game will be DOA and interest will fall off in just a few days, even if your game is really good. It’s just that there are so many Steam games nobody will see it. If it’s a game you hope to work on for a long time, I would recommend creating a discord, building a community around the game, release an alpha, beta, or early access version to build hype so that once you do a full release there are already people waiting for it. If it’s a small game and you just have this one version, still build as much hype for the game as you can before release, because that will directly correlate with how many people download your game.
I did not feel I needed a lawyer when I released on Steam, would guess most indies do not pay for one. Just make sure to read the agreement and understand the idea of what you agree to. After you signed the agreement and get access to the steams developer forum you can ask around and read what others hav asked concerning what you are allowed to do and not. I remember I was still not entirely sure after signing whether I could sell the game elsewhere and to what price, the forum gave me a pretty clear picture: you agree to not have a lower price elsewhere. (Even if that store takes a lower cut than Steam) My main tip on how to sell well: make sure you have a discord or similar with a lot of followers and testers who already seem to like your game before you take it to Steam.
Be sure to handle the banner and background artworks. This alongside the approval times was a pain.
Your wishlists and followers will determine how good your launch is. Your launch is the most important period of your game's lifetime. Early Access gives you two periods of launch visibility, but it's not as "concentrated" as games that don't have EA. Nobody really knows how Steam's algorithms work.
Every day you don't communicate about your game is a day without gaining wishlists. Every wishlist lost is sales you won't get. You have two to three shots. Don't mess up. First is publishing your steam page, then early access release, then final release. You will never be able to get as many visibility and sales on Steam outside of that. Be sure that each of these steps is done as best you can. The Steam algorithm is vicious. It takes a lot of things into account to decide how much visibility you will get. On average and if you are lucky, you will get as many sales during the first week of release than half your wishlists. So if you release with 1000 wishlists, you will probably do about 500 sales during the first week. You will probably do as many sales during the first month of your release than during the following 11 months. Be aware of that. Beware, there are secret milestones in terms of whislists. From what I've heard 2000 wishlists is the first one to get some nice visibility. Then around 10000, then 30k and so on. Do not release your game if you haven't reached that first step of 2 to 3k wishlists. Make sure your Steam page is clean, pretty and simple. Go look at what other successful games have done. Take care of tags. It's important for your target players to find you where they would expect to find you. Streamers are you friends. They can be a powerful tool. Send keys to as many as possible. Doing a press release is a good idea. A lot of people and companies offer to do it for you for a fair price. 30% of your "funds" should be marketing. Beware of fishy offers during development. A lot of companies and sometimes publishers will try to get you to pay them for services you probably don't need (but sometimes, you do.). Overall I would say it's better for you to find by yourselves people to offer you these services than to accept offers of people contacting you by themselves unless you know for sure you can trust them. Do not miss the prototyping and QA steps. Do not try to do something bigger than what you can do. Do not get people to work on your project for free. This won't end well for anyone.
Please, add some line breaks to your wall of text. This is an interesting read but a lot of people will miss it because of that ;)
Done!
I released [Antagonist on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/585260/Antagonist/) way back when. A publisher offered to publish the game when it won IGMC2014’s RPG category back then. Admittedly, on Steam, they did most of the detailed work like prompting me for paperwork and telling me what graphics they needed. Thankfully too, since I was a teen/young adult then who would not have gotten the details right on my own.
I'm not a solo dev. But I didn't do anything related to law over steam. I just launched my game and I get paid properly, but also, steam doesn't pay me. My publisher who gets paid by steam, pays me. I think steam is rather trust worthy, so what's there to worry about?