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.

Steamworks lets you attach your own EULA to your store page. 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. Analytics SDKs, crash and error reporting, online leaderboards, cloud saves tied to an identity, newsletter signups on your website and account systems can all involve personal data. Regimes such as the GDPR in the European Union and the CCPA in California apply based on where your players are, not only where you are, which is why even a solo developer can fall within them.

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. Valve agreements govern the relationship between Valve and the player, and between Valve and you as a developer. They do not set out your terms for your game, they do not describe your data practices, and they 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.