In 2026, we are in an era where publishing a game has never been so “simple”.
Everyone knows Steam , Itch.io , Epic Games Store , Gog.com , AppStore , Google Play Store , etc, etc.
But players forget that behind these showcases hide developers / publishers who struggle every day with very outdated interfaces worthy of the 2000s (the “business” effect). Everything is complicated there!

Steamworks, the juggernaut

I will mainly look into the case of Steam in this article because it is the one that made me tear my hair out the most but at the same time, it is also the one that seems the most strict on the “quality” of what is published.

Mission: demonstrate your seriousness

The first step is to create a Steamworks account… and oh boy, it is already an obstacle course. You have to show your credentials:

• confirm your identity by sending official documents,
• take a selfie with the most tired face on Earth,
• sign forms to be able to be paid by an American company (fortunately Canada has agreements, otherwise it is double tax imposition for the rest of the world),
• pay $100 USD per game to publish,
• then wait for a real person to verify all this information.

If all goes well, an email arrives quickly and you are officially a Steamworks developer!

It’s not the worst

The second step is to tame the Steamworks dashboard.
When you log in for the first time, you are caught between joy and a certain anxiety.
The interface is not at all user-friendly, everything is convoluted and you have to read Steam’s documentation to understand what corresponds to what (and with an interface in French, it is even more confusing… no bravo to the localization team).

It’s too easy to make mistakes. But it does the job.

Except that to be able to publish a store page, we start again in a new battle: the hellish CHECKLIST. Steam asks to:

• produce a huge amount of visuals in order to handle all possible cases (store page background, large promotional banner, small promotional banner, vertical visual like a game cover, image used for listing in the store, etc),
• fill in all the information about the full game (long descriptions not long multilingual, definition of the selling price, technical requirements, supported operating systems, etc),
• self-evaluate the adult content of the game and feel like a deviant when some slightly tendentious elements are mixed with criminal acts,
• and once again, wait a few days once the build is submitted for evaluation.

And I admit that fortunately the technical part is almost entirely managed by my sidekick Sharuru ~

This is why I give you his raw comments: “It’s very manual. No possibility to manage things in batch. Very complete, but very old-school. At least, there is a fairly complete documentation. Besides, they made complex things easier to manage from Steamworks: achievements for example.”

In conclusion

Despite all these pitfalls, the pride of seeing your game appear for the first time in your personal Steam library provides a large enough dose of dopamine to put the rest into perspective.

A bit like when you give birth to a baby. You throw it into a hostile world, but you do your best to give it the best chances so that it can live happily.

And honestly, it still amused me to manage this administrative stuff, it pushed me to create a 20s video trailer to check a box required by Steam!
It was 2 hours of work for 20s… all that to learn from other independent developers that it wasn’t that mandatory. *looong sigh*