Are you wondering how to get a game on Steam? Maybe you are planning on creating a Steam
page but you have no idea what you need to do? No worries! I just recently made a Steam page for my new
game so I figured in this video I will go through everything you need to do to create
a steam page and then at the end I will also give you a few tips on what you should focus
on the most. Hey, my name is Auro. I’m a full-time indie game developer, creator
of Mortal Glory and currently working on a game called Chambers of Devious Design. On top of that, I also make these weekly youtube
videos, sharing my experiences, to help you on your own gamedev journey. Ok let’s start with the topic and let’s
start from the very beginning. The first step to creating a steam page is
to sign up your Steam account as a Steamworks developer account. You can use your own personal account for
this and in some cases that might be a good idea, for example if you’re trying to build
a personal brand as a developer and you feel like your own Steam account is an integral
part of that. But in most cases I think having a separate
company / developer account for this is a smart move. At least that’s what I did. Whichever you choose, you can still later
on set your developer name as whatever you want as your account name won’t be visible
on the Steam page. The developer and publisher names are separate
things you can customize freely. But the account name will be visible on any
Steam groups you are a part of, your Steam developer page for example and of course also
on forums and wherever you can leave a comment. So, it’s good to give a quick thought to
how you would like to present yourself and if you would like to have a separate account
for that purpose. You might now also be wondering if you need
to have a company to register as a developer on Steam. The answer is No. It is not necessary. You can just as well sign up as an individual
and release a game without a company. There are benefits to having a company though. It will differ based on where you live, but
at least in my case there are many taxation benefits to doing business through a company
and if for whatever reason my games would end up in legal trouble, my company would
be the one that ends up getting sued. Not me as an individual. So the company sort of acts as a legal shield
for me. My recommendation is that if you intend to
make money with games, it’s good to have a company. Even then it’s not really necessary in the
beginning though. You can change your company status later on
in Steam as far as I know and you can also transfer game ownership between different
accounts if needed. After you have signed up, you will need to
fill in some details about where you are doing business from, your banking information and
other basic information like that. You will also need to fill a tax questionnaire,
which can be a bit intimidating. Especially if you are not from the U.S. From what I can remember, the instructions
were pretty good for U.S. citizens and companies as Valve is an American company, but for international
companies like mine, it wasn’t really always that clear what was required. But, it’s nothing you can’t get through
with a bit of fact finding, and in tough situations, I’m sure Steam support can also offer some
help. Once you’re done with these, you will need
to pay the Steam direct fee, which is $100. This is a fee that you will need to pay for
every game you put on Steam. So 3 games would be $300. But the good thing is, that you can actually
get the fee paid back to you if your game sells more than $1000. With the fee paid, you can now access the
setup page for your game on Steam. There are many things you need to do before
you can get a steam page up, but luckily Valve has given a handy checklist for you of all
those things. Most of them are quick to check off. The most time consuming ones are the contents
that will be visible on your Steam page. Descriptions, pictures etc. Let’s take a closer look at what are the
fields you need to fill. I could spend hours talking about these so
I’ll try to just give a quick look and not go too deep with the details. First there are some basic details: Setting
names, linking your websites and socials if you want. Then you can fill in some keywords for your
game to help out the algorithm a bit. After that you need to tell which platforms
your game will support and how demanding the game will be. Then you can set what it shows on the page
as the release date. I would advise against setting something vague
like “when it’s done” if you can help it. As a customer it’s not very helpful to read
something like that if you are interested in the game. I would set your best conservative guess there. And remember, you can always adjust it later
on also. If you are going with something vague, I would
at least try making it funny. How about... “When Half Life 3 comes out”. Well, maybe not that one. You still want people to expect the game in
their lifetime. Then there’s a link to a mature content
survey. Steam will tag your game appropriately based
on the survey if your game has something that makes people blush or if it contains a lot
of violence and things like that. Then you can add the languages your game supports. In the beginning you might now yet know if
you’re going to localize your game or not, but I would fill these as soon as you’re
fairly certain which languages you will support. I would also advise you to localize your steam
page to those languages as soon as possible. This way you can start building an audience
for your game within those language groups also. Then there are some details about the number
of supported players, different steam features you will support and then there’s setting
the primary genre of your game. You should pick a genre that fits your game
but personally I don’t think this has a big effect on anything. I could be wrong, but that’s just my hunch. It’s shown on top of your steam page but
that seems to be about it. Your game will still be shown on other genre
pages also if you tag it properly. Speaking of tagging, that’s the next section
and that is actually a very important thing to get right. You can add 20 tags to your game and you should
use all of them. Steam will then use them to try and show your
game across their site to players that are usually interested in games with those tags. If your game has tags that don’t describe
it well, your game is likely to be shown to the wrong customers and you will lose sales
because of that. You can add the tags with a Tagging Wizard
tool that Steam recently added, but you can also do it manually on the game’s Steam
page. There’s a lot I could say about tags - too
much for this video. Maybe I will make a separate video about them
in future. But to give you some quick tips, it’s a
good idea to try and copy tags from similar popular games and it’s also good to have
the most descriptive tags on top. So for example you should have “Turn-Based
Strategy” on top instead of the broader “Strategy” tag. Ok, but let’s move on. Then there’s stuff about controllers, DRM,
3rd party accounts, legal stuff. Nothing really that interesting to indies. And then on the bottom you can enter some
contact details. Then on the second tab you get to fill in
the game’s short & long description. You can also localize them here so the customer
will see different text based on their language setting. Again there’s a lot you could say what to
include and what to not include in these descriptions. My quick advice would be to keep the descriptions
relatively simple and lightweight. Most people won’t bother reading your texts. That’s the reality. They will just glance at a few words and then
move on. This is why pictures and gifs work well here
as they will give the impatient customer an idea about the game without having to read
long paragraphs. Of course there are also those who dislike
gifs and like reading long texts so it’s a balancing effort and can depend on your
target audience. On this tab you can also add info about any
awards or reviews if your game has those. Then on the next tab you can add age rating
details if your game has those. Most indies probably won’t. But you should at least answer a short survey
here so the game can be sold in Brazil. Then there’s a separate tab for Early Access
stuff. I don’t really have anything to say about
that as I haven’t used the feature. Then on the next tab we get to the graphical
assets. There’s a bunch of differently sized images
you will need to submit before you can get your Steam page online so prepare to spend
a fair bit of time putting these together. But it’s good to put the time and effort
into making sure these look nice as they will be a big factor in whether players will enter
your steam page or not. I’ll probably make a separate video to give
some more in-depth tips about these images. Then on the next tab you can upload trailers. It’s not necessary to have a trailer when
you publish a Steam page. But you will need to have one before you can
release your game. As for my quick advice on trailers, keep it
short and go straight to the point. That means no logos in the beginning and straight
to gameplay as soon as possible. If you are not a triple A studio, you will
also want to show a lot of gameplay and very little cutscenes. Most people who open your trailer won’t
watch it all, they will just watch a second here and a second there to see what the game
looks like. Then after that we have some special settings
that you won’t need to touch unless you want to and the last tab is simply for publishing
any changes you have recently made. If we go back to look at the requirement list,
you can notice that we have crossed off most of the things on that list by going through
the pages I just showed you. Now just set a release date for your game,which
you can edit later on by the way, and then navigate yourself to the community assets
section to add a few more images. Then as the final task, you’ll need to go
to the installation tab and add an icon for your game. There are lots of other settings also on this
and the other tabs, but they are more for managing the actual game so you won’t need
to touch them at this point. When you have uploaded the icon, congratulate
yourself as you are done for now. Your page is not quite ready yet to be published,
but you are close. You still need to set your page as ready for
approval after which Valve will take a look within a few days and then either ask you
to change some things or they will give the page their approval and you can then publish
the page at any point you want. Phew ok, that was very briefly everything
you need to do to get a Steam page up. Before I end this video, I still want to give
two quick tips. #1. Copying what others are doing is usually a
good way to learn and improve your page. Don’t look at just one other page but see
if there are some common trends visible in many different pages. Pay extra attention to other popular indie
games in your genre. #2. Not everything is worth the same amount of
effort. There can be differing opinions on this, but
I would say that the effort order, so what you should focus on the most, should look
something like this: Capsule images, First 3 screenshots, First 5 tags, The rest of the
screenshots, The rest of the tags, Trailer, Short description, Long description. So the things on top of that list are the
most important in my opinion. Why? Well, your first goal should be to get the
player to visit your steam page. There are many ways this can happen, but one
of those is that the player is browsing Steam and he or she sees your capsule image and
gets interested. That’s why the capsule image is first on
my list. After that the player will likely hover the
mouse over your capsule, in which case he or she will see your first screenshot and
the first few tags. Then if the mouse stays on the capsule, the
rest of the screenshots will also be shown in whatever order they are on your page. I mentioned the first 3 screenshots just because
that’s around how many I think many people might check in the preview window before entering
the page or moving on. The player will also see the reviews, but
those are mostly not up to you so let’s ignore them in this situation. This is all the information the player gets
before entering your page so those are the most important ones. Then if the player enters your page, they
will usually look through more of your screenshots before checking the trailer or whatever text
you have on your page. They will very likely also check some reviews,
but again those are something we don’t have much control over. I also mentioned the rest of the tags in that
list since they are important for Steam’s algorithm to know who to show your capsule
images to. But hey, that’s all I have to say about
this subject for now. There’s more I could say about the different
sections, but I’ll have to make separate videos for those. Let me know which parts of the Steam page
you would like me to talk about the most. Alright, thanks for watching and I’ll see
you in the next one!
