Legal documents you need for a Steam game

Nothing here is legal advice, and it cannot be. Requirements depend on where your studio is established, where your players are, what data your game touches and how you monetise it. The goal of this page is narrower and more useful: to tell you which documents exist, what each one is for, and when it starts to matter, so that you know what to look into and when it is worth paying an actual lawyer.

For a small premium game with no accounts and no online features, the picture is usually simple. The more your game collects, connects or sells inside itself, the more it is worth getting professional review.

A EULA is the license under which you let someone use your game. It typically sets out what the player may and may not do with the software: that they are buying a license rather than the game itself, whether they can modify or redistribute it, how mods are handled, and what happens with your intellectual property.

Steam expects this to exist as a layer above its own agreement. The Steam Subscriber Agreement says that some Subscriptions may impose additional terms specific to that Subscription, giving an end user license agreement specific to a particular game as its example¹. Many small games ship without a custom one, but if you care about modding rules, redistribution, or protecting your assets specifically, a EULA is where you say so.

A privacy policy explains what personal data you collect, why, where it goes and how someone can ask you about it. This is the document most likely to be legally required rather than merely advisable, and the trigger is usually simpler than developers expect: if your game or its supporting services collect personal data, you generally need one.

Developers routinely underestimate what counts. The GDPR defines personal data as any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person, and names an online identifier as one of the things that can identify someone². That sweeps in far more than a name: analytics SDKs, crash and error reporting, online leaderboards, cloud saves tied to an identity, newsletter signups and account systems can all qualify.

The GDPR reaches you wherever you are. It applies to processing the personal data of people who are in the Union by a controller not established in the Union, where the processing relates to offering goods or services to them, irrespective of whether payment is required, or to monitoring their behaviour within the Union². Selling a game to European players is offering a service to them, so a solo developer outside the EU can be inside its scope.

The CCPA is narrower than it is usually described, and this is worth getting right. California states that it applies to for-profit businesses doing business in California that meet at least one of three thresholds: gross annual revenue over $25 million, buying, selling or sharing the personal information of 100,000 or more California residents or households, or deriving 50% or more of annual revenue from selling California residents personal information³. Most indie studios meet none of them. Assume the GDPR applies to you long before the CCPA does, and recheck the thresholds if the game gets big.

If your game runs any service of its own, multiplayer, user accounts, user generated content, chat or a companion website, terms of service define the rules of that service: acceptable behaviour, what you may remove, moderation, liability and how disputes are handled.

A purely offline single player game usually does not need its own terms of service. The moment players can talk to each other or upload something, it stops being optional in practice.

A common and costly assumption is that publishing on Steam means Valve has the legal side covered. The Steam Subscriber Agreement describes itself as the document that explains the rights and obligations of a subscriber of Steam towards Valve¹. That is a different relationship from yours with your players.

Valve is explicit about the boundary. For everything on Steam not authored by Valve, the agreement states that Valve does not screen such third-party content and assumes no responsibility or liability for it, except to the extent mandatory law provides otherwise¹. Your game is that third-party content. Valve agreements do not set out your terms, do not describe your data practices, and do not license your intellectual property on your behalf.

Your game is built on other people work: an engine, plugins, middleware, music, sound effects, fonts and art. Almost all of it comes with license terms, and many require attribution, restrict certain uses, or distinguish between free and commercial use.

Templates and generators are a reasonable starting point for a straightforward premium game. Get professional advice when the stakes rise: signing with a publisher, taking funding, revenue sharing with contractors or collaborators, adding purchases inside the game, handling data about children, or anything where a mistake would be expensive to unwind.

MarketYourIndie generates the common documents an indie launch needs, so you start from a sensible draft instead of a blank page, and includes a contract analyzer that explains what a publisher or collaborator agreement actually says in plain language before you sign it.