Steam and Other Game Stores: Where to Publish Your Game

This guide covers what it costs and takes to publish on Steam, how the other PC, console, mobile and web stores compare, how to promote your game without crossing any lines, and how to recognise when a competitor is gaming the system instead.

What Steam Direct Is and Why You Need a Distribution Platform

A game store does more than host a download link. It gives you a storefront page, takes payments in dozens of currencies, deals with refunds and sales tax in most countries, and puts your game in front of people who are already in the mood to buy games. On Steam you also get wishlists, reviews, achievements, cloud saves and a recommendation engine that, on a good week, does your marketing for you.

You can sell an installer from your own website, but you’d have to rebuild all of that yourself, and you’d be starting with zero traffic. Most indie developers treat their site as a hub that points people to store pages, not as the store itself.

Steam Direct is Valve’s self-service route onto Steam. It replaced Steam Greenlight in 2017. There’s no community vote any more: you pay a fee, complete the paperwork, pass a review and ship.

How Much It Costs to Publish on Steam: The Steam Direct Fee

The entry price is $100 per game, or the local equivalent. Each new app needs its own fee, so if you plan to release three games, you pay three times. You can pay with any method Steam supports in your country, but not with Steam Wallet funds. Depending on where you live, Valve may also add VAT or GST to the fee.

You get the $100 back once the game earns $1,000 in adjusted gross revenue, and the refund shows up as a line in your monthly sales report. If the game never reaches $1,000, the fee is gone.

After that, Valve’s cut works in tiers:

• 30% on the first $10 million a game earns
• 25% on revenue between $10 million and $50 million
• 20% on everything above $50 million

DLC, in-game purchases and Community Market fees all count toward those thresholds. Realistically, almost every indie game lives in the 30% tier for its whole life.

Before Valve pays you anything, you’ll complete a tax interview inside Steamworks: a W-9 if you’re a US person, or a W-8BEN (W-8BEN-E for companies) if you’re not. This decides how much US withholding tax applies to your payouts. Non-US developers whose country has a tax treaty with the US can often reduce that withholding, so get the form right rather than rushing it.

Step-by-Step: Registering and Publishing Through Steamworks

The process is straightforward, but it has a few waiting periods that catch first-timers out.

1. Create a Steamworks partner account. Sign up at partner.steamgames.com with the Steam account you’ll use to manage the game. You can register as an individual or as a company.
2. Pay the Steam Direct fee. This creates an “app credit” that you then turn into an app ID for your game.
3. Complete tax and banking information. Add bank details for payouts and finish the tax interview. Valve may also ask for identity verification, especially for new partners.
4. Build your “Coming Soon” page. Write the description, upload a capsule, screenshots and a trailer, set tags, choose a release window. This page is where wishlists start accumulating, so publish it as early as you sensibly can, often months before launch.
5. Upload the build via SteamPipe. Use the SteamPipe tools (the GUI uploader or the command-line SteamCMD) to push your build to a depot, then set it live on a branch.
6. Submit for review. Valve reviews both the store page and the build before release. Leave yourself time: Steam expects the “Coming Soon” page to be live for a while before launch, and new partners have a waiting period between paying the fee and being able to release. Check the current timings in Steamworks when you start, because Valve adjusts them.

The most common mistake here is planning a launch date before the store page exists. Put the page up first, then pick a date.

What Valve Actually Checks Before Approving Your Store Page

Valve’s review isn’t a quality judgment. Nobody at Valve decides whether your game is fun. They check that:

• the build launches and runs on the platforms you’ve listed
• the store page describes the game you’re actually shipping, with real screenshots and an honest description
• content follows Steam’s rules, including mature content disclosures and the content survey
• nothing obvious is broken: missing assets, placeholder text, links that go nowhere

If something fails, you’ll get notes and can resubmit. Reviews usually come back within a few business days, but don’t schedule your launch so tightly that a single round of fixes would push it back.

Best Alternatives to Steam: Epic Games Store, GOG, itch.io, Humble

Steam has the biggest audience by a distance, but launching only on Steam leaves money and players behind. Here’s how the main PC alternatives compare.

Epic Games Store has become far more attractive to small developers. Since June 2025, developers keep 100% of the first $1 million in net revenue per product, per year. After that, Epic’s standard 88/12 split applies. From 2026, that $1 million threshold resets every January 1. If you’re willing to launch exclusively on Epic, the Epic First Run programme gives you 100% of revenue for the first six months regardless of how much you earn. Unreal Engine royalties are also waived on sales through the store.

The audience is real, if less engaged than Steam’s. Epic reported 317 million PC users at the end of 2025, a record 78 million monthly active users in December and $400 million spent on third-party games during the year, up 57%. Free games and Fortnite bring people in. Getting them to buy your game is another matter.

GOG is CD Projekt’s DRM-free store. It’s curated rather than open: you pitch your game and GOG decides. The audience leans towards fans of classic and story-driven games, and players there care a lot about owning their copies outright.

itch.io is the most flexible store going. Registration is free, you don’t need a company, and you choose the platform’s cut yourself. The default is 10%, but you can set anything from 0% to 100%. It’s where game jams, experimental projects, early prototypes and pay-what-you-want releases live. Expect a loyal, curious audience rather than big sales numbers.

Humble works mainly through bundles and sales events. Getting in usually needs curator approval, and once charity and partner shares are factored in, your take per copy can be lower than elsewhere. Bundles, however, can introduce your game to a huge number of new players in one go.

Publishing on Consoles: Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Certification

Console stores are free to join, but every one of them puts you under NDA, asks you to sign a publishing agreement and runs your game through certification. That process takes weeks, not days. It’s realistic for a studio with legal support and a QA budget. For a solo developer shipping a first game, consoles usually make more sense as a second wave after a PC launch.

Nintendo deserves a special mention. Lotcheck has a reputation as the strictest of the three, and sleep-mode handling is the classic reason games fail it. With Switch 2 (launched June 2025), Nintendo has been noticeably selective about which games it lets onto the new hardware. Indie studios reported waiting on approvals well into 2026. Register early and assume the first submission won’t be the last.

Whichever console you choose, every failed check sends you back into the queue. Budget for at least one resubmission.

Mobile and Web Platforms: App Store, Google Play, and Casual Portals

Apple App Store. Membership in the Apple Developer Program costs $99 a year. The standard commission is 30%, but if your proceeds stay under $1 million a year you can join the Small Business Program and pay 15%. In the US, a court ruling in April 2025 stopped Apple charging anything on purchases made through external payment links. In August 2026 Apple asked the court to allow fees of up to 15% on those link-outs (5% for small businesses). As of October 2026, no decision has been made.

Google Play. Registration is a one-time $25. The fee structure changed on June 30, 2026 in the US, UK and EEA, and on September 30 in Australia. You now pay a 10% service fee on your first $1 million in annual earnings. Above that, the rate is 20% on purchases from new installs and higher on existing ones, plus a separate 5% if you use Google Play Billing. Canada and the rest of the world are due to follow by September 2027. Read the current terms in the Play Console before you set prices, because the details depend on install dates and which programmes you’ve joined.

Web portals. Browser games are having a moment. Poki says it has over 100 million monthly players and welcomed 625 million players in 2025. It reviews every submission by hand and pays an ad-revenue share. CrazyGames is another large curated portal: publishing is free, you integrate its SDK to monetise, and new games get guaranteed homepage exposure at launch. Newgrounds and GameJolt are smaller and community-driven, both free to publish on and good for building an early fanbase. Kongregate is no longer an option: it stopped accepting new games in July 2020 when Flash was retired.

Web is the lowest-friction route of all. No certification, no store fees, and players are one click from your game. The trade-off is that revenue per player is small and mostly comes from ads.

Comparing Platforms by Fees and Entry Threshold

Here’s the whole landscape in one place, as of October 2026. Terms change often, so check each platform’s current documentation before you commit.

How to Promote Your Game on Each Platform

Getting onto a store is the easy part. The real work is getting noticed once you’re there.

Wishlist campaigns and Steam Next Fest

On Steam, wishlists are your main early signal. When a game launches, everyone who wishlisted it gets an email, and how quickly wishlists grow matters more for the algorithm than the raw total. Plan a series of spikes rather than one big push: store page reveal, first trailer, playable demo, festival appearances, release date announcement.

Steam Next Fest is the biggest of those spikes. It runs three times a year. The current edition runs October 19–26, 2026, and the next two are February 22 – March 1 and June 14–21, 2027. You need a playable demo, and each game can take part only once, ever. Don’t spend your one Next Fest on a demo that isn’t ready.

Curator Connect and influencer outreach

Curator Connect lets you send free Steam keys directly to curators through Steamworks, without trading keys over email. Pick curators and streamers by genre and audience fit rather than follower count. A cosy-game channel with 8,000 subscribers who actually play cosy games is worth more to you than a variety streamer with half a million who won’t like yours. Personalise every request and say plainly why you think they’d like the game.

Tags and the discovery algorithm

Steam requires at least five tags before launch and recommends using up to 20. Only the top 20 are visible and only those influence where Steam shows your game: tag pages, “More Like This” and recommendation shelves. Look at the tags on successful games similar to yours and order yours carefully, because the top slots carry the most weight. Players can vote tags up or down after launch, so check again a few weeks in.

ASO for mobile stores

On the App Store and Google Play, your title, subtitle and keyword fields decide which searches you show up for, and your icon and first two or three screenshots decide whether anyone taps. Treat screenshots like small ads with captions, not raw gameplay frames. Localise your listing for your biggest markets, even if the game itself stays in English for now.

Epic’s Support-A-Creator program

On Epic, creators who join Support-A-Creator get their own code. When fans enter it at checkout, the creator gets a share of the sale, and developers decide how big that share is. It’s a built-in affiliate system, which makes it a natural way to reward streamers who cover your game on Epic.

Community, PR and industry events

A Discord server gives you direct feedback, a place for your most loyal players and a way to reach them that doesn’t depend on any algorithm. Among Us is the famous reminder that patience pays off: it sat largely unnoticed for about two years before streamers picked it up in 2020 and its community exploded. Pair your community work with real-world presence. Events like gamescom and DevGAMM put you in front of press, publishers and other developers, and a well-timed press release still helps when you have news to share.

Manipulation Tactics Competitors Use: Fake Reviews and Download Fraud

Most developers play fair. Some don’t, and it helps to recognise the tricks, both so you don’t mistake them for genuine success and so you can report them.

Buying fake reviews

Positive reviews are sold openly on freelance marketplaces, sometimes for a few dollars each, and some developers pay players in in-game currency or free copies for five-star ratings. Valve has taken firm action when it finds this. In 2018 it removed Insel Games’ titles from Steam after a leaked email showed the CEO pushing staff to review the company’s own game. Later, Polish publisher SimFabric had its account blocked and almost its entire catalogue pulled after a prologue with a peak of just 14 concurrent players suddenly attracted a flood of glowing reviews from brand-new accounts. Telltale signs include bursts of reviews within a day or two, accounts with almost no playtime, and near-identical wording.

Review bombing

Review bombing is the opposite: a coordinated wave of negative reviews, usually reacting to a controversial decision such as a pricing change, a launcher requirement or a political row. Sometimes it’s organic anger, sometimes it’s organised. Steam can flag “off-topic review activity” and exclude it from the score, but the damage to a game’s reputation can happen quickly.

Install fraud and wishlist bots

On mobile, paid user acquisition attracts fraud: install farms, bots and attribution hijacking that make campaigns look better than they are. One vendor study found 36% of the game installs it analysed were fraudulent. AppsFlyer’s more recent data puts fraud in games well below other app categories, but still high in some genres such as casino games. On Steam, developers often report odd bot activity on new wishlist counts. Treat a sudden wishlist jump that doesn’t match any announcement or traffic source with suspicion.

Grey-market key resale

Key reseller sites often sell keys bought with stolen cards or harvested from giveaways. When the original payment is charged back, the developer loses the money, the key may be revoked, and the buyer who paid a reseller blames you. Be careful who you give bulk keys to, and track which batch each key came from.

Platform enforcement

The stores fight back. Since 2016, reviews written by people who activated a game with a Steam key still appear on the page, but don’t count toward the game’s review score. That removed the easiest way to inflate ratings with free keys. Google Play and Apple both explicitly ban manipulating rankings or ratings through fake or incentivised reviews and installs, and both can remove the app or close the developer account.

Legal exposure in Tier-1 markets

Regulators now treat fake reviews as a legal problem, not just a platform-rules one.

• United States. The FTC’s Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule took effect in October 2024. In December 2025 the FTC sent warning letters to ten companies, reminding them that penalties can reach $53,088 per violation.
• United Kingdom. Since April 2025, fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews are banned practices under the DMCC Act. In March 2026 the CMA opened investigations into five businesses.
• Australia. The ACCC secured $215,000 in penalties against carpet-cleaning franchisor A Whistle & Co for posting fake testimonials and pushing franchisees to do the same.
• Canada. Companies can face penalties of up to $10 million, rising to $15 million for repeat orders. The Competition Bureau has already fined Bell Canada $1.25 million after employees posted ratings of its own app on the App Store and Google Play.

If you sell to players in these countries, these rules can apply to you even if your studio is based elsewhere.

Common Mistakes When Choosing a Platform or Publishing

• Launching on one store only. Steam-first is sensible. Steam-only often means giving up Epic’s first-million deal, itch.io’s community and a mobile or web audience you never tested.
• Underestimating certification. Console launches slip by weeks because of a failed check. Plan for at least one resubmission.
• Weak tagging. Five generic tags like “Indie” and “Action” put you in the most crowded corners of Steam. Use all 20 slots and make them specific.
• Ignoring tax. The Steam tax interview is mandatory, and selling directly through your own site or some platforms can mean registering for VAT or sales tax yourself. Check the rules for where your buyers live before you add a direct-sales option.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to publish a game on Steam?
$100 per game, refunded once it earns $1,000. Valve then takes 30% of revenue, falling to 25% and 20% only for games that earn above $10 million and $50 million.

Is console certification harder than getting approved on Steam?
Yes, considerably. Steam checks that your build works and that your page is honest. Console certification tests dozens of technical requirements on real hardware, and each failed round costs weeks.

Do I need to register for VAT if I sell through Steam?
Usually not for Steam sales themselves, because in most regions Steam handles VAT on consumer purchases as the marketplace. Selling directly from your own website or through some smaller stores is different, so check before you add those channels.

How can I tell if a competitor is buying fake reviews?
Look for sudden bursts of positive reviews, reviewer accounts with little playtime or no other reviews, and similar wording repeated across reviews. On Steam you can report them directly from the review.

Conclusion

If you’re releasing your first game in 2026, start with a Steam page as early as you can and treat wishlists and Next Fest as the backbone of your marketing. Put the game on itch.io for community and on Epic, where the first million is now yours to keep. Consider consoles once the PC version is stable and you have the time and budget for certification. For smaller or casual projects, web portals like Poki and CrazyGames are worth testing with very little risk. Whatever you do, grow your reviews honestly. The platforms catch fakes, and in the US, UK, Australia and Canada so do the regulators.

Planning your launch? Once your store pages are live, the next challenge is bringing people to them. Take a look at what IPweb offers for promoting your project.