How to submit games to steam. Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct: What Indie Developers Need to Know

Today we will talk with you about how to add a game to Steam. It's very easy, especially if you know where to click and in what order. So let's try to quickly deal with this topic.

direct purchase

Well, let's start with you with the simplest and most banal scenario. If you are thinking about how to add a game that you just purchased to Steam, then you don’t have to worry - after downloading it will appear in the system automatically.

This is a fairly common way for toys to appear in the client. Typically, when a user purchases an app, it starts downloading to the computer automatically. The system will then prompt you to install. In the case of a positive answer, you will not need to think about how to add the game to Steam. Otherwise, you will be able to implement the idea after you put the toy on the computer.

Not the only scenario. Let's try to figure out how else to answer our today's question.

DIY

Now it's worth considering how to add games to Steam, downloaded, for example, from torrents. Especially if they are hacked. Nobody wants to get banned for using unlicensed content, right?

First of all, we need to find the folder where all the toys are stored. It's called: Steamsteamappscommon. Did you find her? Then install the game in this location. After that, launch the program client. Now you know how to add games to Steam. True, this approach does not always work. Often it just creates a lot of problems that can be quite difficult to solve. Thus, it is necessary to come up with new ways around. And, what is most interesting, they are available. Let's quickly try to find the answer to the following question: "How to add a game to Steam?"

We break the system

Now we have got as close to our question as possible. Now let's quickly figure out how to add third party game on Steam and then play it normally.

The first thing to consider is that not all applications can be launched through this client. The content that is not supported by the program, you will not be able to "shove" into "Steam", no matter how hard you try. So make sure the toy is supported by the customer. Otherwise, as already mentioned, you can leave the idea.

If you know for sure that you made the right choice, then you can try to deal with our question. First, install the game on your computer. It doesn't matter where exactly. Where all your installed programs. After that, you can open the application client and log in to it.

Wondering how to add a game? With "Steam" it will be quite easy and simple. Go to the "Games" section, which is located in the top panel of the program. Now you should pay attention to the very last line - "Add a third-party program". Click on the inscription, and then see what happens.

A window will open that will display all the applications available on the computer. Check the boxes for those games that you want to see in the client, and then click on "Add to Favorites". That's all. Now you know how to add a game to Steam. Everything is easy and simple. You can delete a toy in the same way using the library. Keep in mind that when you clean the client, the application itself is saved in the system.

Conclusion

So we learned how to upload new applications with you to the Steam client. As you can see, there is nothing complicated here. True, if you don’t want to think about this topic for a long time, then you can always buy an application in the program, go through activation and enjoy the process.

In addition, you can always get one or another toy as a gift. After its acceptance, you still don't have to puzzle over the issue of adding content to the system. It is activated in the same way as in the case of self-acquisition. Wait for the download to finish and then just launch the program. That's all. The game will automatically appear in the game library.

After that, you will be able to play normally, as well as receive special collectible cards and achievements. In addition, users who play Steam participate in various contests and sweepstakes from time to time. This way, you can win some official interesting add-on for your applications.

Hello! I had to register your game on Steam, but step by step instructions so could not find it. There was old info about Steam Greenlight or scraps of Steam Direct registration, which gave one answer to some questions - you'll figure it out yourself, everything is clear there. And for me, without experience in this matter, it was far from clear. I had to consult and look for information on the internet.

If you know good articles on registration, write about them in the comments.

I'll tell you about my experience. My name is Denis. I live in Arkhangelsk, Russia. Maybe things will be different in other countries.

We set up an account on steam. I didn’t even find such a simple thing as registering a game on Steam, but only read about SteamWorks on one of the forums. Follow the link and start registration.

Nuance - everywhere we write the same way - first and last name (In English).

First tab "Introduction". Scroll down and click "Continue".

Go to the second tab "Name and Address".

We write legal title. I registered as an individual entrepreneur, so I write my first and last name.

"Company Form", choose - Sole proprietorship(single owner).

The address. For example, Lenina 25, bldg. 3, apt. 73, will be like Lenin 25/3 apt 73

"Non-disclosure agreement", check the box Continue".

"Steam Distribution Agreement", scroll down, fill in the items, check the boxes and enter the captcha. In the graph "position of the signatory" write Owner as the only owner.

You will be transferred to Steam itself. Log in to your account, choose a payment method. I chose Visa. You need to pay 100$. In my case, after the purchase, without an SMS request, 5,650 rubles were withdrawn.

Further "Payment and tax information".
There are two sections here and .
I had difficulty with these points.

To do this, you need to open a bank account. After calling a few, I chose Tinkoff. It seems to me that he has the most favorable rate for withdrawal. 6 months of free service, then per month - 490 rubles, commission for withdrawal (per month) - up to 400,000 rubles. 1.5% + RUB 99 If on debit card Tinkoff, then up to 150,000 rubles. no commission. If you need to shoot more, then there are other tariffs that are also, in principle, beneficial for large amounts. If you know other profitable options, write them in the comments.

Having opened an account in rubles, I find out such a thing. With Steam, the money will come in dollars. Therefore, in my case, dollars will bounce off my ruble account. Therefore, I open an account in dollars. This is a simple procedure. Call your bank and they'll tell you everything.
Even when filling in some items, errors occurred. For example, such that the system did not believe that I was 28 years old. Reloading the page didn't help. I had to go out and click “Enter tax information” again, fill it out, and this time everything was without errors.

Go to "Enter payment information"

We fill out the form. You can find out the SWIFT code of the bank by calling your bank. Select the type of account "Current (settlement)". Save.

Then we go to point "Enter tax information"
Start/ Continue

Everything is normal here, except for the item “passport expiration date”. What??? This item surprised me a little, but if you think about it ... We change our passport at 20 years old, 45 years old, then like 55 years old, then I don’t know ...
I'm 28 years old (fuck the time flies). It turns out that the validity of the passport will expire at 45 years. In my case, the date of birth is: day, month and 2035. But on Steam you can only specify 2027, so we write 2027)

Then this item. I don't remember where it came from. Maybe after incomprehensible errors it appeared as a confirmation of the address.

Consents. Everywhere put "Yes"

status. Not

Type of actual income of the owner, here this word was automatically Individual, did not change

After I choose Russia

Then they ask if there is TIN?

At first I chose "No". And got extra. 30% tax.

Turns out, TIN- this is our TIN. Therefore, we write "Yes" and fill in the paragraph "foreign TIN"

And we get 0% tax

And in conclusion "Sign & Submit" put checkmarks everywhere, fill out the forms and click "Submit Form W-8BEN"

My application was considered for a day. We get the long-awaited opportunity to add our game

I hope now no one will have problems registering in Steam Direct

Soon we will make a prototype of the game. If you are interested in what project this registration was for, then you can see it in the group

With the move to Steam Direct, there are a lot of questions to be answered, so there are rumors and speculation among consumers and developers alike. As a developer who has been very familiar with the Greenlight process since 2015 and successfully completed it twice with Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion and HD Renovation (these games have more than a million users in total), I would like to talk about Direct and first impressions about it There's a lot to talk about, including changes to protect against abuse of Steam Trading Cards, pricing, and what the new system will mean for developers and consumers.

The old way: Steam Greenlight

Let's start the conversation with Steam Greenlight. This will be just background information, I will try to make it shorter. Steam Greenlight is a Steam feature implemented by Valve to help indie developers sell their games on Steam. How the process worked: The developer paid Valve $100 to participate in Greenlight. The developer had to pay this fee only once, and then could upload any number of games to Steam Greenlight. The money was not returned.

After payment, the developer was given access to the Steam Greenlight portal, where he could create a Greenlight page with information about the game (name and description), upload videos, trailers and screenshots to it, useful links(for example, a demo of the game) and links to pages in social networks. In addition, it was necessary to add everyone involved in the creation to the page (if there was someone else besides you), after which everything was ready to publish the page in Greenlight.

Now for how the approval process worked - once the page was published, your game would end up in the Steam Greenlight, where users would vote "Yes", "No" or "Maybe" to express their interest. In addition, they could subscribe to the page and share links to it, leave comments, read blog posts and announcements from the page creator. All games in Greenlight were ranked by the number of “Yes” votes, and if your game was in the top 100 the best Steam Greenlight, then you could count on eventual success. If a game made it to the very top of the popularity contest (one of the top five places), your game was approved by the community and given a green light. Congratulations! What happened after is not very important for this article, so let's stop there.

New way: Steam Direct

Now let's talk about Steam Direct and what we know about this process. Remember the $100 Steam Greenlight Contribution? By paying it, you could publish any number of games. Well, now you have to pay 100 dollars per game. The fee is no longer a one-time fee. Bright side, so to speak, is that if your game itself earns more than $ 1000 on Steam, then these $ 100 will be returned to you.

After payment, you need to fill in information about yourself: name, social security number, etc., so that you can verify that you are really who you say you are. Valve also requires the completion of a tax form and banking information. During the filling process, you will be required to sign several non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). After all this bureaucratic work is done and when the company makes sure that you are a real person, you will be allowed to enter commercial information - the name of the game, description, cost, etc. In the Greenlight process, you didn't have to do this until your page was greenlit.

Once you've dealt with all this, you'll be invited to the Steam Developer Portal. Here you can upload your game: files, achievements, Steam trading cards and the like. It is necessary to submit for testing almost finished version Valve games to ensure the company is not trying to publish malware or the like on the platform. This usually takes several days. The same applies to Steam trading cards and other additional files for the game. Valve recommends that you do all this no later than 30 days before the game is scheduled to release, so that all files are approved in a reasonable amount of time and no one has to panic. The term "game" does not have strict definitions, but Valve will spend a few days checking that your game matches the description on the page. Once approved by Valve, you can release the game on Steam. Congratulations!

The price of fame

Yes, there are problems with this. Most importantly, before, your game had to gain some interest in the Steam Greenlight. In Steam Direct, you just need to pay, and that's it - you're already in business. The problem is that Steam is practically turning into the PC version of the Google Play Store.

This is a very dubious move for me as a developer and consumer, because there will be more on the platform more games. It doesn't seem so bad, does it? But in fact, this is so, because on Steam it is already difficult to find in the general heap standing games - 40% of games on Steam were released in 2016. With the Steam Direct system, the process of finding new games that will attract your interest is even more complicated. As a developer, you have to compete with a bunch of not-so-great quality games, occupying the main page that you should have taken.

Steam Direct adds a new continuous stream of games, but finding games is also tricky due to user-added tags. Anyone, troll or not, can go to the game page on Steam and add tags to it. Often very low quality games are labeled "horror" or "scary" even if they are not horror. It could be a 2D side-scroller about a cake-collecting unicorn, but if the game isn't good enough, the trolls will label it "horror." If you search for new games tagged “horror”, you will certainly find horror games or scary games, but there will also be games that are definitely not related to this genre. This problem already exists, but the more low-quality games appear on Steam due to the constant addition of new ones, the more users will abuse the labeling system.

Another opinion of mine may be unpopular. I spoke to several developers and they, like me, believe that the price publishing a game to Steam Direct should be slightly higher than $100. In my opinion, it should be at least $500, especially considering that you will get money back if you sell more than $1,000. Thanks to Patreon, developer streaming channels on Twitch, and just donations collected on the site good developer and good game easily collect the required amount of money.

Speaking of payment, what about those developers who sell games for 99 cents or even for free? They won't get their money back, and if they do, 99 cents should be a solid amount of sales. The situation with free games is even worse, because in-game transactions are not taken into account when refunding funds. Someone may say: “Why return the money? You get ADVERTISING!”. Or, “Why do you want your money back? Are you making games just to make money?!” To both of these statements, I can answer that game development is not always cheap. Well, when you get feedback for your work, it helps to create new games.

An interesting (to say the least) situation with developers releasing free games. I sympathize with those who want to put the game on Steam, make it free and at the same time do not get it with this new system nothing is not very fair to them. Developers making little money may not get any money at all. My first game on Steam was free. I understood that I could not return the money, because: 1.) It is impossible and 2.) None of the developers will return their money. If the Steam Direct system had been introduced then, I would be jealous of those who returned their money, because I would not have been able to do this. I hope there will be some kind of system to help such developers free games. Might be worth refunding if they have X downloads like it's a paid game that made $1000.

And Another Topic: Steam Trading Card Abuse

A major problem with Steam Greenlight has been the abuse of Steam Trading Cards. The developers generated thousands of keys, passed them to bots that launched Steam games for card farming. Then they put a high price on the cards and received a percentage of their sales.

This problem exists on several levels, including two of our favorite words - the Steam algorithm. If you didn't know: the more time a game is played, the more steam sees it as popular, so it advertises it more on the main page, recommends it to users, etc. It is clear that this is a serious problem. Steam shows us unpopular and low quality games because card farming bots break the whole system.

With the introduction of Steam Direct, Valve has changed the approach: now the game with cards needs to reach a certain number of hours gameplay for all players, plus it must correspond to some other indicators that Valve hides from us. As soon as the game reaches these indicators, the cards begin to fall out. After that, all players who have accumulated time in this game will receive cards. Sounds cool, right? Well, not quite. Especially when you consider the fact that we do not know the indicators that the game should achieve. Not to mention, Steam Trading Cards are a big reason to not buy - if users can't get the cards right away, that could be a problem. Even with the current system, consumers complain that the cards don't fall out. It hurts the shop, achievement hunters, and collectors, all in the name of fighting the small number of people farming cards for money. But I am sure that even with such changes, card farmers will still find ways to continue their shenanigans.

Hey! This is my game!

The last problem that came to my mind is probably the most important of all. It's a problem of stolen works and DMCA bans. During the Steam Greenlight process, attackers sometimes completely copied an already existing page in Greenlight and published it in Greenlight. Why I call them "intruders": The link to the game demo actually led to malware. Greenlight had fake pages that tricked unsuspecting users into downloading malware.

This has happened least once with the original Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion in Greenlight. What should a developer do when he sees this? In Steam Greenlight, the developer and the community could complain about a page with a copy of their game, in addition, they could ask for a DMCA block, and if a game gets enough complaints, it gets banned.The same goes for fan games and games with substituted assets.What about Steam Direct? Direct, you will no longer be able to ask for a DMCA ban until the game is released and starts making money, which is pretty scary to me.

In the worst case, a malicious developer can take someone's game, make money from it, and disappear. Such people can even take games from free sources (like itch.io or gamejolt) and pass them off as their own. Hopefully Valve will be very careful not to make it too difficult for a developer to fix the problem or we'll be flooded with content like this.

Where to go next?

That's all the information we have so far, plus my thoughts. We just need to wait for the details to do a more precise analysis to decide if it's a good idea or not. I understand where Valve comes from when making these changes. It aims to reduce obstacles in the way of developers, but I'm not sure that such a system is well protected from people trying to exploit it to "cut down" easy money.

There are three ways to add a game to the Steam Library:

• through the built-in store;
• through the "Add a third-party game" button;
• by entering a digital key.

When buying through the store, games are added automatically, the other two methods require simple manipulations through the program interface. Let's talk about them in more detail.

Note: the screenshots for this manual were taken on Windows 10. On other versions of the OS, as well as on Mac OS and Linux, the procedure is the same.

Adding a third party game (previously downloaded)

This feature is useful when the game has already been downloaded and installed on the computer without using Steam, and there is a need to add it to the program library for your own convenience. To do this, you need to follow a few simple steps.

Open Steam, in the lower left corner we find the inscription "Add", click on it with the left mouse button. In the menu that opens, select "Add a third-party game", click on it.

All applications installed on the computer will be displayed in a new window.

Find the desired game in this list, and click on the checkbox (arrow number 1) next to its name so that a checkmark appears there.

If you need to add several games, then we also select them with ticks sequentially. After the end, click the "Add Selected" button (arrow number 2).

If desired game is not in the list, but you are sure that it is installed on your computer, you can specify the path to it manually. Click the "Browse" button, an Explorer window will open in which you need to find its executable file. This file is easily recognizable by its icon and EXE extension. We find it, select it with the mouse, click the "Open" button.

After clicking the "Add Selected" button, the specified file is added to the Steam library and appears in the general list on the left. Now it can be launched directly from the application using the "Play" button.

Adding a game with a key

You can add a game to Steam using a digital key that you previously purchased from another store or received as a gift from friends.

Launch the program and open the "Library" tab. Here, in the lower left corner, find the "Add" button, click on it and select "Activate on Steam".

Will appear in a new window short description activation process. Here we click "Continue".

A standard subscriber agreement will appear, you need to read it (or at least view it), and then click "Agree".

In the next window, a field for adding a key will appear (arrow No. 1), after entering which we click "Next" (arrow No. 2).

If the key is entered correctly, it is valid and not activated, the following window will appear:

We press the "Finish" button. After that, the game will be activated and will appear in the general list of games in the Steam library.

To open it, you need to click on the name with the mouse and click the "Install" button.

The game will be downloaded, installed on the computer, and after that it will become available for launch.