Running out of Steam
or - what I wish I knew before launching on Steam
TL;DR - Incomplete documentation, slow support, and they will decide to stop supporting your app without notice.
If you know me, you might know that I've been working on a retro gaming arcade start-up for a while. Unfortunately, we didn't get traction on our first few iterations, so we decided to try to simplify our product and monetize it at least a little bit. Our plan was to get our cosmetics into an item marketplace. We looked around and the best fit was Steam. According to their documentation, we could launch on their platform and utilize their marketplace to let people trade our game items. It looked really promising. Then we started implementing.
Even though Steam (Valve) looks like a big company, when you start dealing with their systems and support - it becomes clear it's a small, somewhat disorganized team. I do think their store release platform and flow is a great example of how a self-service platform should operate, but it has a lot of gaps. There are many places in the UI where you actually can't edit the value and you have to put in a support ticket. After you put in a support ticket you have to wait a few days or weeks to get an answer. Sometimes, the person answering doesn't even know what you're asking for and you have to point them to their own documentation. Then you'll get passed to another person, and wait a few days or weeks for response.
The way they're set up, you have to launch your game before you can utilize the marketplace. So we clawed our way through and eventually got our game launched. It was about 3 months of inching forward, and then getting delayed waiting for a support request.
So we finally launched and tried to use the marketplace. Their documentation shows many different options for implementing an item economy with them. The names are confusing, the documentation is incomplete, and you're going to have to fiddle with it until it works.
We chose to use the Steam Economy API to allow us to be the authoritative server of who owns items, but still allow items to be traded in the marketplace. After a few weeks of development we were ready. We configured our API Endpoint (which required a support ticket), and started watching our back-end to see if calls were working or not.
They were not. Another support ticket.
After many back and forths about why it wasn't working they basically said: We don't support this API anymore. The admin console showed it as an option. The documentation showed it as an option. But they simply said, "No."
Three months have now passed, and the the documentation still shows it as an option. So either they just decided they didn't want to let us use it - or they actually did change their policy without notifying anyone or updating their documentation. Both are pretty bad.
If you want to launch a regular game on Steam - it's probably fine. If you want to do anything special with items or the marketplace, don't.