Legal Questions/Concerns About Game Publishing On Steam

[Pedro Pascal as Joel Miller]

To whomever shall help me,

I am thinking about starting game development at age 14. I have an idea of what I want to do in my head and I am about to start learning java and c++ and how to use unity. Now, I know that I cannot sign legal documents at the moment, but in order to publish a game to steam what documents/contracts would need to be signed? I know I would also have to make a startup fund to get the $100 for greenlight, would this need any legal documents? And would starting development at this age at all be worth it? (I live in the United States btw)

[Cathulhu]

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted

[らﾉ几凵什モ]

I think you should start with google play developing moble games to begging with, Ik is a little competitive to get into these big companies if you dont have any projects. Here is the link for google play legal documents
https://play.google.com/intl/ALL_us/about/developer-distribution-agreement.html

[Pedro Pascal as Joel Miller]

Originally posted by Sinuhe:

I think you should start with google play developing moble games to begging with, Ik is a little competitive to get into these big companies if you dont have any projects. Here is the link for google play legal documents
https://play.google.com/intl/ALL_us/about/developer-distribution-agreement.html

Eh, I’d rather not develop mobile games... there’s a lot of downsides to mobile gaming and I could put a lot more features into a pc game anyways

[nullable]

I think you should probably worry about learning the basics and developing a few games/projects before you really start worrying about publishing details.

You're kind of putting the cart before the horse as far as the Steam publishing details go. It's very doubtful your projects will fail if you don't figure out publishing before you've written a line of code or created any assets.

It might be a couple of years... and by then some of the issues you have with being a minor wouldn't be there anymore. Otherwise you'll probably need your legal guardians to give you an assist for some things.

[Zekiran]

14 is too young to be legally allowed to even sign paperwork. So... yeah, keep learning.

In the meantime, write down and keep extensive notes about what specifically you want your "final product" to be like. Learn how any of those things are done. Learn engines, coding proper, art... whatever it is you're good at.

ONE person very rarely is able to do a full game alone. Can you also do music? Can you do sound fx? You know you cannot rely on 'stuff you find online' for those, right? So yeah you'll want to wait and learn more, before putting anything out into the open, let alone attempt to sell something on Steam.

If your school has programs for it, see if a computer / coding / math / science teacher has interest in starting up a club for such a thing. Schools can participate in Steam's programs for this (they'd need to look into it, I do not have that information).