How to publish an indie game

“Publishing” used to mean persuading somebody with a cheque book. It mostly does not any more: every major route is self-serve. The real question is which storefront, what it costs, and how much work you have to do after you press publish — which is nearly all of the work.

The honest summary first

For most indie developers, Steam is the answer. It is where the buyers are. Everything below is about the cases where it is not the whole answer, or not the first step.

The routes, compared

Steam

One-off fee per title, recoupable once you sell enough. Takes a revenue share. The largest audience in PC gaming by a wide margin, and the only storefront where a player might find you without you doing the finding.

Good for: finished, paid PC games. Costs you: the fee, the cut, a build that passes review, a store page that does a lot of heavy lifting, and a wishlist campaign started months before launch. The catch: visibility is competitive and launch week largely decides the rest. Turning up on the day is too late.

itch.io

Free to publish, pay-what-you-want revenue share including zero. No gatekeeping, no review queue, and web builds run in the browser.

Good for: prototypes, jam games, demos, free releases, and finding out whether anybody cares before committing a year. Costs you: nothing. The catch: discovery is thin unless you bring people, so treat it as somewhere to send people rather than somewhere they arrive.

Consoles

Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox all run developer programmes. Approval, certification, dev kits and platform requirements. Real money is here, and so is real overhead.

Good for: finished games with a track record. Costs you: months, certification work and usually a PC release first to prove the thing. The catch: not a first step for a first game.

The browser

No store, no approval, no install. A link is the whole distribution mechanism, which means somebody can play your game three seconds after reading about it — by far the shortest path from curiosity to playing that exists.

Good for: demos, free-to-play, multiplayer, anything you want shared in a message. Costs you: hosting and bandwidth, which is the bit that bites exactly when things go well. The catch: harder to charge for, and a WebGL or Wasm build has its own constraints.

A publisher

Still exists, still sometimes right. They fund and market in exchange for a share and usually some control.

Good for: developers who would rather build than market, with something good enough to interest one. Costs you: a share of revenue, often rights, sometimes creative say. The catch: read the contract with a lawyer, specifically the termination and rights-reversion clauses. This is the one place in indie development where a bad decision is genuinely hard to undo.

What publishing actually involves

The store page is a tiny part of it. In rough order:

• A build that works on hardware you do not own. Test on something slow and something old.
• A store page that sells it in six seconds — capsule art, a trailer that opens on gameplay, and a first line that says what the game is rather than what it is about.
• A trailer. No logos for the first five seconds. Show the thing being played.
• Somewhere for people to go — a Discord, a mailing list, anything you own and nobody can switch off.
• A press and creator list, built by hand, small and relevant. Twenty people who cover your genre beat two thousand who do not.
• Something to say after launch. Launch is not the end of marketing, it is roughly the middle.

That second half — promotion — is the larger job, and the one most first games underestimate. It has its own guide: how to promote an indie game.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Launching quietly. A storefront is not an audience. If nobody knew it was coming, nobody knows it arrived.
• Shipping into silence to meet a date. Nothing is waiting for your date. Delay is cheaper than a bad launch, because launch happens once.
• Treating the demo as an afterthought. For a lot of players the demo is the store page.
• No way to reach the people who liked it. If you cannot contact the people who played the first one, you start from zero on the second.

Where Arcade Union fits

We are not a storefront and we are not trying to replace Steam. What we do is narrower: we carry browser games and the infrastructure under them.

Concretely, for a game on our indie game launchpad: we take on the delivery and bandwidth, you get leaderboards and player accounts already built, and players arrive with a history across our other games rather than as strangers. Optional Web3 tooling is there if your game needs it, and ignorable if it does not.

Our launchpad page is unusually blunt about what we have not got — no audience to hand you, and a node network that does not exist yet. Worth reading before you decide.

The honest recommendation: if you have a finished paid PC game, go to Steam. If you have a browser game, a demo, or something multiplayer that benefits from a link rather than an install, talk to us. Those are different problems and we only claim to help with the second.

Published 12 October 2026. Platform fees and terms change — check the storefront before relying on any of this. If something here has aged badly, tell us.