I am heading towards my first commercial launch on Steam. With that comes a lot of new things to learn: the finances, the dev integration, the art assets Steam requires. There’s so much. Here’s all of the most important things I wanted or needed as a first time developer on Steam.
Note: I’m a developer, not a lawyer or accountant. Everything here is me learning and setting up Brainfart Studio. Use the information here as a guide, not advice for your situation.
The Financial Side
$100 Fee
Steam charges $100 per game to submit through Steam Direct. That fee is not refunded. It’s recouped instead. Valve holds it against your first $1,000 in Adjusted Gross Revenue. Once you cross that threshold, the $100 shows up as an item in your payout report and effectively comes back to you.
Revenue Split
Steam takes 30%, you keep 70%. That’s the standard split and the one relevant for first time devs. Valve does adjust the percentage at higher revenue tiers (better splits kick in past $10 million and $50 million), but that’s not a number I need to plan around right now.
Tax Setup
Before Steamworks lets you do anything with money, you need to fill out a tax interview. US developers file a W-9 (or similar). Non-US developers file a W-8BEN. This determines how Valve reports your earnings and whether any withholding applies.
Your bank account name has to match the name on your tax form. If your studio operates under a different name than the one on your bank account, sort that out before you submit the paperwork.
Valve does not withhold taxes on your behalf. Whatever you owe based on your country and structure is on you to handle separately.
Review Process
After you pay the $100 fee, there’s a mandatory 30-day waiting period before you’re allowed to release your game. This is a flat waiting period Valve uses to verify who they’re doing business with. You cannot pay to skip it and you cannot submit anything to shorten it.
Inside that 30-day window, two separate reviews happen:
- Store page review: 1 to 5 business days. This checks that your page is filled out correctly and accurately represents the game.
- Build review: 1 to 5 business days. This checks that the game actually runs.
Both of these can be submitted and cleared inside the 30-day wait. Once your store page is approved, it goes up as a “Coming Soon” page, and that’s when wishlists start counting. Steam also requires that Coming Soon page to be publicly visible for at least two weeks before release, so factor that into your timeline alongside the 30-day wait.
Practically, that means the moment I pay the fee, the clock starts on three things at once: the 30-day identity wait, the store page review, and the two-week minimum Coming Soon visibility window. Submitting the store page early is important. It’s the only way to start collecting wishlists before launch.
Technical Integrations
Steamworks SDK
Steam features like achievements and cloud saves don’t work automatically just because your game is on Steam. Your game has to talk to Steam’s backend directly. Check if an achievement condition is met, tell Steam to unlock it, upload a save file, and so on. Valve provides an SDK to make that possible.
An SDK, or software development kit, is a set of code someone else already wrote so you don’t have to write it yourself. In this case, it’s the Steamworks SDK. This is a collection of functions for talking to Steam’s servers. There’s functions to unlock an achievement, check if the player owns a specific DLC…nearly anything you can think of concerning Steam. Without the SDK, you’d have to reverse-engineer Steam’s backend and build all of that from scratch.
Steamworks.NET
The catch is that the Steamworks SDK is written in C++. Unity (which I’m using for Laser Beast) uses C#. The two languages can’t talk to each other directly without something bridging the gap.
That’s what Steamworks.NET is. It’s a wrapper or a separate library that takes the C++ Steamworks SDK and re-exposes every function in C#. Unity scripts can call it like any other C# method.
Features I’m Implementing
For Laser Beast, I’m implementing two things:
- Achievements tied into the existing event system. AchievementManager listens for game events and checks conditions against SaveManager before pushing an unlock to Steam.
- Cloud Save syncs save data across devices through Steam’s auto-cloud feature, so progress isn’t locked to one machine.
I’m not doing trading cards, leaderboards, or Steam Workshop support (at least for this game). Trading cards and leaderboards are mostly relevant for games built around replay value or competitive scoring. Workshop only matters if you’re supporting user-generated content.
Laser Beast is a fixed set of hand-designed levels, so none of that applies. I do think they could be useful in a game like Laser Beast. But with my goal of learning the overall process and just getting my first game on Steam, I made the decision to keep things simpler for now.
Art Asset Requirements
Steam requires a specific set of image assets before your store page can go live.
- Header capsule: 460×215
- Small capsule: 231×87
- Main capsule: 616×353
- Vertical capsule: 374×448
- Library assets: a few additional sizes used across the Steam library view and user profile pages, separate from the storefront capsules above
- Screenshots: 5 minimum, 1920×1080 recommended
- Trailer: at least 1 video
Every capsule image needs your game’s title as readable text on the image itself. Steam enforces this rule. A capsule that’s just a nice piece of art with no title gets sent back, so this needs to be communicated to an artist before any capsule work starts.
Where This Leaves Me
The biggest thing I learned is the financial and legal setup. I hadn’t considered the time it would take to get tax situation decided, fill out paperwork, get a separate bank account. Add in the 30 day mandatory wait window from Steam? My original timeline of launching by the end of July is just not possible. The 30 day window for Steam alone would push me back to mid-August.
Factor in my goal for Brainfart Studio being to eventually hire other people. I want to make sure legally I am protected and do things correctly. It becomes an issue of sole proprietor vs LLC. This adds in additional time needed to make business decisions. There’s just a lot to consider. More on that in a future article.
There is just a lot more behind the scenes that I had not originally factored into my timeline. My original timeline of end of July is no longer reasonable. I considered going one more quarter out (3 months), but I’m not sure that would work either. So I’ve given myself another 6 months. Enough time to sort out the business structure and continue making Laser Beast as good as possible. My new launch date is January 1st, 2027.
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