Steam (Valve)

Overview

This note is typically about developing games for Steam, not about using the platform.

One-liners

• To find a user’s Steam ID, you can simply paste their URL into https://steamid.io/
• If you need to download your existing assets, it’s easiest through SteamDB (e.g. this link)
• To modify your community icon, use a link like this
  • To see this, go to https://steamcommunity.com/ after clicking the hub for a game (e.g. this link)
• To modify your client icon, use a link like this
• To make GIFs, I highly recommend Gifski. It’s so easy, and you can preview export sizes to make sure you’ll fit Steam’s requirements.

Playtests

Note

It took ~3 days for Valve to review my playtest app’s store page, then it takes another ~1-2 days to get keys (although mine only took a few hours), then it takes 3-5 business days to review the actual app, so budget time for this!

Steam has a playtest feature (reference). There are two main ways to use this:

• Add a “Request Access” button to your Steam page that will allow people to sign up anonymously. From there, you can allow in some number of people.
• Give out playtest keys to specific people.

Assuming you have a demo online already, playtests takes slightly north of an hour since you have to make a new page, make new depots, upload assets, etc. You could probably speed that up if you recently set up another Steam page.

Note: when setting everything up for the first time, I don’t think I properly had builds, but that doesn’t matter for the store review; the documentation says this:

The store review checklist for a Playtest only consists of capsule images and icons.

However, you also need them to review a build of your game.

Once your store page has been reviewed:

• Go to your main app → Store Page Admin → Special Settings → click the text link that says “click here to set up visibility” about halfway down the page. If you just want to give out keys:
  • Set the visibility to “Hidden”.
  • To give out keys, go to your playtest app’s App Data Admin → Manage Keys → Default Release Key. I chose “Giveaway” as the option and “Playtest” as the tag. Once you’re done requesting the keys, you’ll have to wait a day or two.
• Submit the build for review.
  • This is required to set the playtest to playable (e.g. via this link).

Troubleshooting

SteamCMD updates instead of running my command

If an update is available, then running commands will typically just automatically perform the update and then not run the command. It will exit with code 42 when this happens. What I’ve generally done is to run steamcmd --help just to make sure it’s up-to-date, then run my actual command.

SteamCMD fails with a generic “FAILURE” message

This was maddening:

ERROR! Failed to commit build for AppID 3838630 : Failure

…but I finally found my specific cause: I was trying to upload to a branch named alphatest despite not having created that branch on Steamworks.