What you build is an ordinary Godot project, which is the shape a game gets sold in

A native desktop game. A program somebody installs on their own Mac or Windows machine and runs there, at their framerate, on their hardware. Not a web page, not a link into our app, not something that only opens inside the tool that made it.

The person who buys it needs nothing from us. No Stage Engine account, no internet connection, no copy of the app anywhere on their computer. Once the game is built it is an ordinary program and it behaves like one.

Behind it is an ordinary Godot project: GDScript in a folder on your own disk, which Godot opens, and Godot is open source and free. Ownership, licences and the terms of your subscription are legal questions and they live on the terms page, not here. Read them before you charge anybody anything.

Most tools aimed at people who do not write code produce something that only exists inside the tool. That is a fine trade for a weekend and a bad one for a game with buyers, because a project you cannot hand to anybody is a project with exactly one possible future.

Godot is widely used and widely documented. If your game finds an audience and you want to bring somebody in to help, there are people who already know it. If you want to fix something yourself at two in the morning, the code is text in your own folder. If we disappeared tomorrow, the project would still open.

That last sentence is not a comfortable thing to put on our own website, and it is the honest reason the format is worth caring about more than any feature list.

Steam is the obvious destination for a native PC game, and there is a route to it inside the app. You work through the store page there — the capsule image, the title, a short description, tags, screenshots and video, the price, the languages, the system requirements and the age rating — and then submit it. Steam reviews what you send and comes back either with the page live or with something it wants changed.

The costs of that route are itemised in the app at the moment you submit, rather than quoted on this page. Some of them are Steam's and some are ours, and they are read from the current schedule rather than from marketing copy written at some earlier date. Trust the screen, not this paragraph.

itch.io is the lighter route, and a sensible place for a first small game or for a free version while you are still working out whether the thing is any good.

Not the tool. Scope. Most first commercial projects die because the game has one idea and runs out of it after twenty minutes, and no engine has ever fixed that. A world you can walk around is where the work starts, not where it ends.

Then there is the unglamorous list that every game people pay for has and every demo skips: a settings menu with resolution and volume, key rebinding, a save system that never loses progress, a pause that actually pauses, and sensible behaviour when the window loses focus. Director 1 will write all of it. Deciding that it matters is your job, and doing it late is what makes a finished game feel unfinished.

And watch somebody else play before you charge for it. Do not help, do not explain, and write down every place they hesitated. That list is more reliable than your own opinion, because they are meeting the game the way a buyer will.

The price list. Free, Indie at $10 a month, Pro at $50. There is no separate commercial tier, no per-seat plan and nothing that switches on because the game is for sale rather than for friends.

The engine does not change and neither does where the game runs. A plan buys AI usage while you are building. It does not sit underneath the finished game, which is a program on a player's machine doing nothing on our behalf.

What does change is how much that unglamorous list costs you in time, and how early you have to start caring about it. A hobby project can skip the settings menu. A game with a price cannot.

Anything about ownership, rights, licences or the terms of the subscription. Those are legal questions with legal answers, and they belong on the terms page. A friendly paraphrase of a contract is worth nothing to somebody making a decision about money, so we are not going to write one here.

If your decision turns on one of those points, read the terms first and ask us about anything that is unclear. That is a better use of an evening than building a game on top of an assumption.