Publishing games as a kid (Under 18, over 13)

General
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Alright, before I begin I want to get some things straight: Yes, I do have some programming experience and no, my question is not related to how long it takes to get good. Yes, this is more of a legal problem than a programming problem. And finally yes, I’ve done some research, I’ll put everything I know on the bottom of the post (And will update it with the information people give me, so ignore the edits)

A bit of context
First I’ll just share a bit about my story to give this question some context:
I first got into coding when I was around 7, making lego robots and such. Then the pandemic came and I couldn’t take the course anymore, but I did try to get a bit into Scratch but didn’t get very far. During the pandemic my parents found a really good python teacher, who basically taught me lots and lots of python, and I learnt all the basics which would allow me to make some decent programs. (I did learn a bit of PyGame but didn’t understand how the frame system worked at the time) After a while, my teacher got a job and moved to another country. I had a small break in programming, then came back, and I was basically bored in online classes so I tried to get into scratch again. I spent another 3 years in scratch, and I do owe a lot to it, since Python allowed me to understand what each function actually did and Scratch allowed me to understand the logic. I entered a couple of competitions (os wars) where I met a lot of people who also knew other programming languages, and were incorporated some techniques in their projects. I understood a lot about how the frame system worked, and after a while I just found Scratch too easy and wanted to move on. I looked for game engines, and I eventually settled on Godot due to gdscript using Python’s syntax (Which I knew). That brings us up to now, where I spent around 6 months (without the procastination only 2) making a game. The game is not finished yet but I started looking for feedback on it, to start to tweak it and prepare for its initial release. I began to look at the policies for a bunch of platforms for their requirements to publish games and I realized it wasn’t actually as easy as I’d initially thought. For now, my game is only on Itch.io but I’m looking to publish it on more platforms. That brings us to now, and back to the question:

How to publish games under 18?
That’s my question, as simple as that, but way more complicated than it seems. From what I’ve researched online, there are 4 requirements that most platforms share:

  1. Pass quality standards: The simplest one, I’m not too worried on it, and this is not my question.
  2. Show some demo of the game: It’s also simple, I just either export the game or share the Itch.io link. Again, simple
  3. Contact information: This is where the first problem arises: I don’t know what to put. In laws of most countries from what I’ve researched you must be over 18 in order to sign contracts. Obviously, I can’t sign contracts yet. I did see that it is still possible, with “written parent consent”. I do have my parents’ consent but I don’t know if there’s any other special procedure I should follow. So should I put my parent’s name? Should I put my own? My own with a message? My parent’s with a message?
  4. Contracts: And of course, actually accepting the contracts and whether it’s risky or not, I don’t want to get my parents into legal trouble.

The other problem with this is marketing. I know the game won’t get popular or anything but at least I want to to get some slight attention. In scratch it was really easy, just add your game to lots of studios, share it with some friends and that’s it, you could get 500 views in one day. Meanwhile the Itch.io game only has 40 views in a week. This brings me to another problem. A common strategy is to share games on social media. And this doesn’t seem as a problem at first since I’m over 13 and can use these legally but their rules for sharing content varies, and I do not want to use my personal accounts for obvious reasons. Most platforms do offer a business account, but again, I’m a kid and naturally I don’t own a business or work in one, and to create these you need to enter a bunch of legal documents which I can not provide, and if I could again the consent problem. So should I just create a new personal account? They do ask me for a new phone number/email which accounts can’t share. So… in this side I’m also stuck.

That’s basically all the issues I’ve encountered so far. Here are all the conclusions I gathered:

Information so far:

  • People under 18 can not sign contracts.
  • People under 18 can have written consent from their parents in order to sign contracts
    • Is this risky?
    • Does it allow any extra operation?
  • Policies of platforms on publishing under 18 vary
    • Itch.io allows this.
    • Steam does seem to allow this but various people say differently.
    • Crazy Games doesn’t have much information, but there are people who have gotten their Scratch games on there, and that actually recommend it so it maybe isn’t too hard
    • Some other platforms don’t have much information on the topic.
  • A lot of people have asked this same question on many forums but I haven’t seen a clear answer.

That’s it for now, thanks for your time!

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I am a programming teacher and game developer; very glad to see such positive influence in gaming. The tools we have today are fantastic and learning PyGame first and with help will do you tremendously well. For reference/history PyGame is a thin wrapper around SDL2 of which SDL2 has been the backbone of a good 99% of games in the last two decades. Unity and Unreal both use SDL2 for windowing and inputs, Godot only uses parts of SDL2 for gamepad and joysticks. If you learn to make games in C or derived languages like C++/Zig/Rust you can use SDL2 (and now SDL3!) just as you did for PyGame. Anyways, history lesson over, onto publishers.

You probably do not want a publisher at this stage. But you can publish your games on platforms like itch.io, gamejolt.com, maybe even web-platforms like crazygames.com and poki.com. Contracts and payments may have to go through your parents.

If a publisher does come in contact with you, be very careful, keep your rights to your intelletual property. At this digital age publishers largely handle marketing and events, investigate how they do marketing, how strong their presence is.

Marketing is tough, it’s a whole skill set. From my experience steam does an okay job marketing your game if you simply upload it, obviously it does much better with external help. Itch has good simple analytics to watch, tags and play-in-browser are good for getting hits within the site, though again it will be low on it’s own. Social media is the “external help” it will the best way to get hits, though each platform has it’s own culture and advertising suite, so it will take a while to learn even one platform, and certainly will need parent’s permission to run ads, for now it may be best to stick to free posts with plenty of tags.

Yes make a new personal account, or use your own personal account. Scrub personal information from it. Most indie developers do use their own account, the line blurs between business and personal accounts as more and more brands use personable advertising anyways. Try different platforms if you already have an account on one.

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The easiest and most reliable way is to distribute your games through an adult relative. That he would act as your “commercial agent”.

That’s a very good thing.

Don’t expect a quick profit. I for two and a half years did not get a kopeck (Russian — cents, pennies) for tutorials that turned out to be in demand and useful.

I have a very similar problem with income and distribution of games, only it is not due to age, but due to sanctions imposed on the country I live in.

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Yeah, that’s what I thought, and I probably couldn’t afford a publisher anyway. I’m planning to add my game on both Crazygames and Poki, if they get accepted, and hopefully add it on other platforms.

My only problem with this is I want to separate my personal accounts for chatting with irl friends from the advertisements, and I can’t seem to create a new account without a new email and phone number, I will consider this though. And yeah, I’ll probably try new platforms, I just don’t know which ones

Thank you!

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Yeah, for now I don’t care much about the money but more to get more feedback to improve for when I actually start publishing for profit later on or get hired

That’s really sad… Hopefully your situation improves soon

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As of my thought, over 13 is enough to start game development. You can publish game over 13, like steam has some features, I think you just need parents permissions.

You need to think your own strategy to do game development properly. Like how to viral your game, etc.

I am providing some simple ways to do game development, if it does not match, try to gain it for the best results for your work.

  1. Do you have reddit?
  2. Do you have a YouTube channel?
  3. Do you have enough experience that you can do anything?
  4. Do you have enough time to do game development?
  5. Do you have your own planning and strategy to do anything?

Hope this helps!

Do not answer the questions, I was just saying about what you need as of my 2 yrs experience.

It’s very simple reason that you are getting low views. First, I think the game is too simple. Second, you just normally launched the game instead of participating in a game jam. Third reason, the most popular genre in itch.io is horror. So simple or other games does not stands automatically.

My recommendation: Create unique and short psx horror games for itch.io

Example: Hope you know the game, Don’t Stay Awake, which is created by a developer who is 15 and the game is in top position.

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Is getting another phone number a problem? It’s normal to have several phone numbers and e-mails for different purposes: work, family, shopping. They even make phones that support multiple SIM cards.

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Thanks for the advice. I didn’t think that reddit would be too useful but I’ll try it

I also realized that a bit after making the post. I didn’t really want to make a huge game for my first one as it’s meant more of a small web game ( I do have some bigger ones planned, but I’m doing some like this for practice first)
I actually ended up putting the game in a feedback jam and that did the trick, I almost tripled my views. And honestly I don’t really feel like doing horror since it’s not much of my thing and I’m not that creative in that sense. Either way I can try to find other platforms that have preferences more suited to my game.
Thanks for the advice :slight_smile:

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The thing is I don’t really know how to get it, like I don’t know if I would have to buy a new sim card or what, I don’t really have a spare phone to use.
I did actually want to make a new email but I needed the phone number to make it

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Gmail and most other email providers automatically merge all the emails that only differ by periods (ex.ample = example). I’ve used this to create a few different online accounts, all only differing by a period.

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There are many email services that don’t require a phone number.

And there are also “instant” mailboxes that are suitable for registration.

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Oooh that’s a good idea, thank you

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Social media

Thanks to everyone for their tips! Following this I’ve started some new pages and would like some feedback on how to customize them, and which ones to discard and which ones to keep since they’re too many. I would really like any feedback you have to improve my pages (some don’t have posts though)

Thanks, this helped me make all my accounts easily.

I won’t use a publisher anyway, but I’m getting the game ready to implement in those websites. I already have a gamejolt page but it’s doing even worse than itch (Itch is decent now by the way):

Gamejolt

By watching some videos and tips online I saw that the most recommended to do this is reddit:

Reddit

I haven’t been active yet and this is my first time using Reddit but so far it seems pretty nice actually.

I’m currently working on adding more mechanics on the game from the feedback I’ve gotten, and I also put it on some feedback jams which really helped. I also participated with some teammates in another jam so that got it some views too.

I’m working with some friends to get some ideas for one :slight_smile:

I saw that Itch had some integrations, so I made some accounts there:

Threads and Mastodon

I tried making a X account and I kind of did, but there were just too many annoying rate limits and I didn’t really like the conversations there enough to keep reading (Too much political fights) so I just gave up on that.

Other platforms I made:

Youtube

To try to post trailers and things like that

Instagram

I made it since it’s really popular where I lived and a bunch of people I know found the game with it.

Other things

This duoscorpion guy got his post flagged, so I couldn’t reply and there’s not much point to it but for further situations no, I don’t want anyone to publish the game for me, that’s the whole point of this post, to publish it myself and I don’t trust you.
Anyways, I also saw that it might actually be possible for me to get a credit card right now which makes things much easier, and to maybe set up google ads but I’m not sure on it. The other thing is I’m wondering if there’s any way to monetize it (even if it’s just a few cents, but mostly just for fun) on desktop, since from what I saw in godot you can basically only use CrazyGames or the google play ads.
Again, thanks to everyone for all your help!

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Welcome! You should have no problem for your age, because age is not a matter in game development, that’s what I think. Just remember to stay in plan, I lost few years for it (not to stay in plan). Keep Learning! :slight_smile:
Best of luck for your journey! :+1:

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Thanks!

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