Steamworks offers a large collection of tools that can help you add value to your product. These include things like Matchmaking, Achievements, and Steam Workshop (User-Generated Content). You are free to use as few or as many as you like - not all features of Steamworks are appropriate for all products.
Some features like Trading Cards can be set up entirely in the Steamworks portal, while others will need to be implemented in your product. See the
for more technical information.
This section gives an overview of the Steamworks features and where applicable includes presentations or tutorials about a particular topic.
| Common Redistributables | Steam provides an easy way to opt into installing certain shared components which are required for the proper operation of your game or application, including many versions of the Microsoft Visual C redistributables. |
| Game Notifications | Steam Game Notifications is a system for delivering offline notifications to users for games that provide asynchronous multiplayer gaming, such as Chess. |
| Microtransactions (In-Game Purchases) | Steam provides world class support for in game purchases, whether that is items, in-game currency, or anything else that you can think up, you can use the Steam Microtransaction APIs to provide customers with more choices. |
| Multiplayer | Steam started as a multiplayer gaming platform with the release of Counter-Strike 1.6 and multiplayer has always been a huge focus. Steam provides many different features and APIs to improve the multiplayer experience for developers and customers alike. With these features you can easily allow players to find and play with each other using the Steam Matchmaking APIs, or use the Steam Game Servers API to provide persistent dedicated servers that your players can create communities around. |
| Stats and Achievements | Steam Stats and Achievements provides an easy way for your game to provide persistent, roaming achievement and statistics tracking for your users. The user's data is associated with their Steam account, and each user's achievements and statistics can be formatted and displayed in their Steam Community Profile. |
| Enhanced Rich Presence | With the recent release of the new Steam Friends and Chat client we've enhanced the capabilities of our rich presence system to show more about the games being played. We see a player's rich presence as a way to engage the player's friends in their activity. For example, friends who own the game engage by knowing the right time to join the game or by talking about it with the player, and those who don't own the game may have their interest piqued by coming across a variety of rich presence strings that tell them more about a game that they don't know much about. |
| Steam Cloud | The Steam Cloud provides an easy and transparent remote file storage system for your game. Files specified in the Auto-Cloud
configuration or written to disk (created, modified, deleted, etc.) using the Cloud API will automatically be replicated to the Steam servers after the game exits. |
| Steam Input | Steam Input is a flexible input library that supports over three hundred devices including all common variants of Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, and Steam Controllers. |
| Steam DRM | The Steam DRM wrapper is an important part of Steam platform because it verifies game ownership and ensures that Steamworks features work properly by launching Steam before launching the game. |
| Steam Error Reporting | If Steam error reporting is implemented then Steam will automatically upload mini dumps of any exception after 10 similar exceptions are thrown. |
| Steam HTML Surface | The Steam HTML Surface API enables the display and render of HTML-based pages directly in a game or application. It is built upon the Chromium Embedded Framework and supports HTML5 markup. |
| Steam Inventory Service | The Steam Inventory Service is a set of features that allow a game to enable persistent player inventories without having to run special servers to manage users or items. |
| Steam Keys | For any of your products on Steam, you can generate keys to enable customers to redeem your product on Steam. Keys can be generated for any packages on Steam, including base products, DLC or free Demos. |
| Steam Leaderboards | Steam supports persistent leaderboards with automatically ordered entries. These leaderboards can be used to display global and friend leaderboards in your game and on your community webpage. Each Steamworks title can create up to 10,000 leaderboards, and each leaderboard can be retrieved immediately after a player's score has been inserted. |
| Steam Overlay | The Steam overlay is a piece of the Steam user interface that can be activated over the top of almost any game launched through Steam. It lets the user access the friends list, web browser, chat, and in-game DLC purchasing. |
| Steam Remote Play | You can optimize your game for playing remotely on all kinds of devices, including phones, tablets, and TV. |
| Steam Screenshots | Screenshot support is provided automatically through the Steam Overlay to every game through Steam and Steamworks provides a set of APIs designed to interact with this system. The Steamworks Screenshots API allows you to take screenshots and add them to a users local screenshot library with additional metadata such as the name of a location in your game or tagging users that appear in the screenshot. |
| Steam Timelines | Timeline support allows a game to push game events to Steam for display alongside recorded video from the game. This makes it easier for users to find important moments in their gameplay so they can share those moments. |
| Steam Voice | The Steam Voice API is a set of functions that allow you record audio from the user's microphone in either compressed or uncompressed format. This can be used to implement voice chat or a voice command system. |
| Steam Workshop | The Steam Workshop is designed as a place for your fans and community members to participate in the creation of content for your game. The form of this creation by community members can vary depending on the nature of the game and what kind of control you wish to have over the content in your game. |
| User Authentication and Ownership | Steamworks exposes multiple methods for authenticating a Steam user's identity and verifying ownership of an application. |
| Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) and Game Bans | Steam provides several tools to help manage cheating in online videogames. Whether you choose to integrate our anti-cheat APIs or use your own solution, make sure you give your customers proper warning that such a system exists and that you have UI ingame that clearly explains the ban. |
| Virtual Reality | Steam and Steamworks provide robust support for Virtual Reality experiences via SteamVR. This section provides information about how to develop SteamVR applications and additional requirements for distributing them on Steam. |
