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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