Releasing games on Steam without using the SteamSDK

This month I'm very busy preparing my first commercial game for the v1.0 release in December. Additionally, I will also speak at GodotFest26 and SFSCON in November. For that reason this month's blog post will be short, but informative ;-)

There is this myth out there that the SteamSDK is needed to release games on Steam. Even the official docs state that it is needed to upload content to Steam:

The Steamworks SDK provides a range of features which are designed to help ship your application or game on Steam in an efficient manner. The Steamworks SDK is only required to upload your content to Steam, everything else provided through the SDK is optional.

But this is no longer true, because Steam also provides a Web Upload tool. I've been using this now for over a year without any issues. Well actually most of the time, the upload fails and I have to retry several times. Aside from that, the tool does its job and allows me to release a game without ever touching the SDK.

The tool can be found under Steamworks > App Admin > YourGameName > SteamPipe > Web Uploads. It has a 2048MB limit per compressed files, but my game is only about 100MB big. For more complex setups where multiple files need to be uploaded, this might not work correctly.

Let's hope that Steam updates their documentation, so more developers actually know about this :-)