Just to clear things up.
That 100$ per game fee is recoupable. Valve will pay it back to you once your product has at reached at least $1000 USD adjusted gross revenue on Steam.
The only reason why that fee exists is to keep the worst of the worst and the laziest of the laziest games out of Steam, i.e. to help weed out effortless and “hey look at my first game”-type deals out of the store.
That’s understandable but I think there is way too much competition on Steam for casual games to reach a gross revenue of $1000 USD (at least not in a reasonable period of time).
BTW, what’s the average (user-accepted) pricing range for Corona-like indie casual games on Steam at the moment?
Well personally I’d rather casual games were kept away from Steam. That’s not what it’s for. If a game can’t make $1,000 then it isn’t good enough to be on Steam.
You can have a look at what other Corona devs have done and what they are asking on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34260302-Made-with-Corona/
Your price should be based on what you consider the game to be worth and what you expect people to be willing to pay for it. Not what someone else is asking for theirs.
Nowadays you can pay £100 I think to publish a game on there. You used to either have a publisher or get it approved on Steam Greenlight.
The process of uploading is a little complex, I’ll see if I can dig out the instructions. I seem to remember having all sorts of problems uploading from mac as it needed a very specific version of python, used a Windows VM in the end.
Thank you for your answer, I am doing windows games now, I want to post it to steam, but I don’t know if I can talk about how to connect with steam, can I post the game, have relevant examples or experience, process and other information?
I don’t see any reason why you can’t talk about the process of uploading to Steam. Have you signed some Non-Disclosure Agreement with Valve/Steam saying you can’t talk about the process?
Rob
Emmm…sorry, I use computer translation, translation error, I mean, do you know about how to post games on steam？related experiences, examples, step, or other things that can help me publish games on steam? i dont know how to post games on steam。
Has anyone successfully developed game by Corona and released the game on Steam, and wrote the steps for the release to give us a reference?
@Ponywolf has published several games there as have other developers. Let me see if I can get them to respond.
Yep, you just pay the fee $100USD and that buys you a token that you can use to post a item. It’s not much more complex than Apple’s process as far a signups go…
https://partner.steamgames.com/steamdirect
Once you have a “partner account” create your game page and community pages… These are pretty simple. You upload images to the Steamworks site an use a Markdown-like sirte to build descriptions. Here’s SKIPCHASER’s page (*cough* *cough*) if you want to try out purchasing and reviewing 
https://store.steampowered.com/app/508410/SKIPCHASER/
Once you are ready to test your game, the easiest thing is to start with a WIN32 Build and upload it with the SteamPipe GUI tool and flag it as a BETA. Then you can give away keys that just unlock BETA builds while you work the kinks out. You could do all this via a CLI, but this tool is dead simple.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading#steampipe_gui_tool
Once you are ready to rock, set your price, flag it as ready to release and after a minor review your game is for sale.
All in all, once you have the upload process figured out it super easy to make new beta builds, test those out and then switch branches to make the beta the public branch.
There’s a bunch of other stuff you *can* do with DRM, cross-platform with one content directory, etc. But I’d reco doing a basic Win32 build first. We only sell about 15% via the Mac Steam store.
Hope that helps!
Hey Ponywolf!
Wow, congratulations! You are one of the few developers whose work (as far I see it) with Corona seems completely professional. Respect! I’m curious: do you make any decent money on Steam (for PC)?
Thank you for your answer, very helpful to me, can you tell me your game on steam? I want to have fun
Steam isn’t as viable as it used to be, but we wanted to have products in lots of different places–wanted to make a joystick centric game too… So mission accomplished. That said, I don’t know if I’ve ever been “happy” with sales… :)
Our game is here…
Thanks Ponywolf. Out of curiosity, how hard is it to go from the directory created by the Build for Win32 in Corona to having it set up on the Steam store from a files perspective. It is as simple as uploading the directory, or do we need to create some type of setup exe or a setup script?
What about monetisation? Is it possible to show ads in a steam game?
Generally, you monetize on steam by selling your game or app for an up-front fee. They do have micro-transactions and our plugin has some support for them, but I don’t have any experience.
Ad-supported games and apps on desktop platforms are very rare and there isn’t a lot of evidence that it’s an effective way to monetize your apps. Ads are common for websites and mobile platforms, but not desktops.
Rob
So you have to pay $100 per uploaded game? Or is this just a one-time fee?
Do you need to wrap your game with an installer (f.e. Inno Setup etc.)?
Per game, I believe.
No need to wrap the game, although you can apply Steam’s DRM tools if you want. For Mac this involves running the .app file through a local program before uploading, for Windows you upload the .exe to Steam, download it again and replace the old one.
Mac and Windows can both be uploaded at the same time through their uploading tool. It’s fairly complex to setup and I never managed it on Mac (involves very specific versions of Python etc.), so I always switch to Windows to use a shortcut to the command line tool. However once it’s setup it works well because it only uploads the difference between the previous build and the current one, so if it’s just code changes it can be a matter of kilobytes.
Really? :blink: Then this would not be worthwhile for most casual games. They would only start to bring profit after a couple of months then - if at all.