Yesterday Steam denied my current build for release, and today i'm therefore unable to release my game as planned, until it gets approved.
The reason given for this denial was that according to them "the game does not appear to currently support online gameplay ", yep, that's right.
Despite the fact that after more than a year in closed testing hundreds of players participated in games (mostly online), in multiplayer, and that as i received this reply the current test server i'm running myself had players online...
Now before i go on I must say that this also happened because i made a really bad mistake. I had so many things to deal with the upcoming release, that i didnt realize in time that i had to send a build for manual review and approval before being allowed to release. I wrongly assumed that releasing was automated (like pretty much everything else) and a formality that wouldnt take long like every other steps i had to pass before, especially as everything was ready. But i was wrong. This was the ONE of the few things that had to be manually approved by actual people.
When i realized it about 3 days ago, it said that it usually took 2 to 3 days to approve (but could take more if there was issues), so I hoped for the best and submitted it only to receive a negative answer yesterday night.
Of this i am totally responsible, I should have realized this before and started this earlier. Considering things now... apparently weeks before the release date!
This is my first game release, so i'm learning here and making mistakes, espcecially as being alone to manage so many different things and where an error in a single one can make everything else fail - as it now did. For this i apologize to everyone.
But i have to say you'd be surprise how even as a dev, we have pretty much zero human contact with anyone from Valve either. Its more of a self running website where all you're left with is some documentation and a forum of other devs trying to figure out things themselves too and sharing experiences. You can't get any help, and the whole steamworks interface is very confusing, sometimes even faulty/buggy, which doesnt help to make things intuitive.
Is there still humans working at Valve ? nobody knows. I personnally suspect Gabe merged with the mainframe "lawnmower man" style years ago, and left us all to despair with this platform.
More seriously, the ONLY way to contact anyone human at Valve is to send... a support ticket. To which you'll eventually get an anonymous response of about 12 words -at best-, after a day or more. When i realized my mistake i did that. Luckily i got a one line answer - as is tradition - saying they'd speed up the process, but only to receive this absurd denial an hour later.
And the denial explanation was the most cryptic part: " we found out that the game is using the public IP instead of the IP4 address which the port is open for. This happen with hosting only a server form the localfolder. "
If anyone understand the meaning of this sentence, please give me a call.
What is this rambling about the 'public IP' when for an online multiplayer game, that's what it should be using to allow others to connect... online, rather than using a local IP only reachable via LAN ?
What is this thing about 'instead of IP4 address' when all IPs ARE in IPv4 format ?
ANd what the hell does " hosting only a server from the localfolder " even means in this context ?
Nobody knows.
Apparently not only did these testers failed where hundreds of testers have never had trouble doing so during over a year of tests (which is to simply join an existing server), but they ignored the visible public server showing online players at that very time, and concluded that surely that must have been an illusion and that online multiplayer did not exist in this game, while giving the most absurd explanation that made zero technical sense to me.
And as it was an anonymous message with no way to reply directly, that means being back at square one, having to resubmit, and wait again 3 to 5 days. I have no way to ask these specific guys what the hell did they mean or tried to do.
Worst of this is that i don't even know what to change , considering their reply made no sense, so i just ended up resubmitring the exact same thing... with one minor change: i removed the "online multiplayer" tag as it's apparently what triggers them, adding insult to injury for a game that is mainly... online... and multiplayer.
So here i am now, on release day, unable to release my game after about 8 years of work.
Big AAA city builders games are about to be released in a week or so. I had the perfect release day planned, and now it's ruined.
But even though it's partly my fault, i can't keep but feeling bitter at the lack of understanding from Valve's side. On one hand because they didnt seem to care that denying me this for some absurd reason ruined such an important day for me, and on the other because i can't help but feel infuriated that somehow my game was under greater scrutiny and had to meet high quality standards( resulting in a denial), when in the meantime the cheapest porn games and asset flippers seem to be released on a daily basis without the slightest oversight on steam. Like...really Steam? MY game gets its release denied but those are fine?
So what now ? Well i'll release as soon as i can. I don't know when that will be now. I can't do anything else right now but wait...
Best case scenario it sill somehow happens today.
If not its probably over until at least Monday as this will be the week end.