How to publish a game on Steam, start to finish

About 20,000 games came out on Steam in 2025: 20,008 by SteamDB's count, 20,558 by GameDiscoverCo's, according to How To Market A Game's January 2026 tally of four trackers. There is no gatekeeper in the old sense. No publisher has to sign you, and nobody at Valve judges whether the game is good. What there is instead is a sequence: paperwork, a fee, a wait, two reviews and a minimum time on the store as Coming Soon. Miss one step and the launch date moves.

This guide is that sequence in order, with Valve's own numbers as they read on 18 October 2026. Most of the waits can overlap, so the shortest honest timeline for a first game is about six weeks from signing up to release, and the realistic one, with months of wishlists on a Coming Soon page, is much longer.

The steps, the time Valve gives for each, and what can run in parallel:

Sign up on Steamworks as an individual or a company and digitally sign the Steam Direct agreement. Valve then asks for:

• Identity verification of whoever signs.
• A tax questionnaire that sets your tax status and withholding rate. What it asks depends on whether you sign as an individual or a company and where you are based; US developers give the equivalent of a W-9, and developers elsewhere usually the equivalent of a W-8BEN, which can reduce withholding under a tax treaty.
• Bank details: routing number, account number and bank address, with an account holder name that matches your legal identification. A company without a business bank account has to open one first.

Valve says verification takes 15 to 30 days. Start it the week you decide you will ship on Steam; it is the step most likely to stall a launch date, and nothing else is blocked while it runs. This is general information, not tax advice.

The Steam Direct fee is $100 per game, paid with any Steam payment method in your region except the Steam Wallet. It is not refundable, but it is recouped: Valve pays it back in a later payment once the game reaches $1,000 in adjusted gross revenue from store and in-app purchases.

For your first few titles, Valve applies a 30-day waiting period between paying the fee and being able to release the game. So pay it as soon as the paperwork is in. Paying early costs nothing, and it removes a wait you cannot shorten later. Our Steam Direct fee guide covers recoup and what counts towards the $1,000.

Paying the fee gives you an app credit, and the app you create with it gets its own App ID and landing page in Steamworks. Fill in its Store Presence checklist: short and long descriptions, tags, capsules and library art, at least five screenshots, a trailer, system requirements, supported languages, the content survey and the AI content disclosure. Then press Mark as ready for review.

Valve's reviewers check that the page describes only what will be in the game at launch (planned features removed or marked as not yet released), that capsules show a readable title or logo, that screenshots show gameplay rather than concept art, cinematics or marketing text, and that the description is detailed and has no links to other websites. Early Access pages must answer every Early Access question.

Review usually takes 3 to 5 business days, and Valve asks for the page at least seven business days before you want it live. Once approved, publish it as Coming Soon. It must stay Coming Soon for at least two weeks before release, and every day it is up it collects wishlists, so most developers put it up months earlier. Our store page review guide has what slows a review down, and the Steam image sizes guide every asset size.

Set a base price in US dollars and let Steam's pricing tool propose the other currencies, or set them yourself. Price review usually takes one or two business days. Price for the game you are shipping, against comparable games on Steam, not against your hours of work. Our regional pricing guide covers the currencies and the minimums, and the launch discount guide the discount you set before release.

Upload a mostly final build to the default branch with SteamPipe, Valve's content system, and complete the Game Build checklist. The store page has to be submitted before the build can be. Valve's build review checks three things: that the game starts properly on every operating system the store page lists, that every feature the page describes is in the build, and that any in-game purchases use the Steam Wallet with no links to stores that do not.

Build review also usually takes 3 to 5 business days; Valve says to plan for at least seven. Once the game is approved, later updates are not reviewed again, so the build can keep improving right up to release.

If your game is made in Godot, Steam features such as achievements, cloud saves and multiplayer come through an extension such as GodotSteam; see our GodotSteam guide.

Approved games do not release on their own. With the store page approved, two weeks of Coming Soon behind you and the build approved, the release is four clicks on the app's landing page:

1. Press the green Release App button.
2. Read the summary of what the release will do.
3. Press Publish Now and confirm.
4. Press Release Now.

That publishes the store package, turns on the launch discount if you set one, marks the game playable and released, and stamps the release time as now. The account that presses it needs the Publish app changes to Steam and Manage pricing and discounts permissions, so check them the day before.

• The review score is hidden at first. A new game's page shows no score until it has ten reviews from Steam purchasers; reviews from keys activated elsewhere do not count towards it.
• Answer negative reviews calmly and specifically, with what you fixed. A developer response is public and read by every future buyer.
• No discount for 30 days after release, Early Access included, apart from the launch discount you set beforehand.
• Payouts. Valve pays monthly, about 30 days after the month of the sales, by bank transfer: February's sales are paid at the end of March, if the month's revenue passed the $100 minimum. Your Sales & Activations reports update in near real time but exclude deductions; the monthly report itemises refunds, taxes and other deductions and shows what you will actually be paid. See our Steamworks reports guide.
• Valve's share is 30% of a game's revenue up to $10 million, 25% to $50 million and 20% above; see Steam's revenue share.

• Starting the paperwork last. Fifteen to thirty days of verification cannot be hurried.
• Paying the fee late. The 30-day wait for a first title starts at payment.
• Submitting the store page a week before you want it up. Seven business days is Valve's ask, and a rejection sends it back into the queue.
• Listing features the build does not have. It fails the page review or the build review.
• Concept art in the screenshots. Reviewers ask for gameplay.
• A Coming Soon page put up two weeks before launch. It meets the rule and wastes the wishlists the page could have collected.

Flockbay is a free AI game builder on the official Godot engine. It makes the native Windows build, drafts the whole Steam store page (copy, tags, content survey, AI disclosure, capsules and library art) and exports it as a .zip with a README naming the Steamworks page each part goes on. You do the paperwork, the uploads and the presses yourself: Flockbay never sends anything to Steam. Steam page drafting is free in beta until 1 December 2026, and preparing the page by hand and its .zip stay free.