Can I sell games made with Leadwerks on Steam Store?

[sabino]

Hi all,

Today I've a question about the commercial use of Leadwerks engine. If I develop a game made with this engine, can I publish it on Steam Store?

Are they protected by a serial code?

What license and terms of conditions have I to agree?

Thank you!

[AggrorJorn]

You can sell the games via Steam if you get your game greenlit. You can publish the game via the editor and you will get an output folder containing all the executables and data.

Currently you can publish free to play lua-games directly to the Leadwerks workshop (this is not the same thing as the steam store).

You do not have to pay royalties, display a leadwerks logo or even mention Leadwerks if you don't want to.

 

Assets can be password protected via packages although I am not entirely sure how this process works.

[Josh]

If you want a registration key / serial code you will need to implement this yourself. I don't recommend doing this if your game is on Steam, since all it does is annoy people.

[AggrorJorn]

And packaging/protecting your asset files?

[Rick]

And packaging/protecting your asset files?

 

Can't we do that in the C++ version now?

 

Package::Load() has a password parameter so some time ago I remember testing password protecting zip files and it worked. Can't recall if that was just 3.0 but this seems like it should work right?

 

Inside main.cpp

//Load any zip files in main directory
Leadwerks::Directory* dir = Leadwerks::FileSystem::LoadDir(".");
if (dir)
{
for (int i=0; i<dir->files.size(); i++)
{
std::string file = dir->files[i];
if (Leadwerks::String::Lower(Leadwerks::FileSystem::ExtractExt(file))=="zip")
{
Leadwerks::Package::Load(file);
}
}
delete dir;
}

 

I seem to recall just zipping all the asset folders as they exist in the project directory (the same dir as the exe).

[gamecreator]

Yes, it's an unofficial/undocumented feature at the moment.

 

Related reading:

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/8659-implement-virtual-filesystem/

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/10034-publishing-a-game/

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/8095-making-a-single-assets-file/

[YouGroove]

It will have to become official feature incorporated in the engine like do other 3D engines.

Until then, no one using LE3 Steam edition will be able to publish anything.

[nick.ace]

It will have to become official feature incorporated in the engine like do other 3D engines.

Until then, no one using LE3 Steam edition will be able to publish anything.

 

That's not true at all! While I agree this should be an official feature for all versions, there are ways to publish without it. First of all, you don't need protection if your project includes assets that can be freely distributed (such as public domain stuff or stuff you make) and you are fine with users having access to that stuff. Second of all, there are tools out there that specialize in asset protection such as Smart Packer Pro.

[gamecreator]

Not to mention that as far as I can tell, it works fine right now!! Sure, it doesn't package it automatically but it's not like you need this process every day or even every week. When you finish a demo, zip up your files, password protect them, add in the code and you're done! Maybe I'm missing something but just because it's undocumented doesn't mean it's unusable.