Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6. Publishing Your Game to
the Windows 8 Store
It is incredibly easy to set up a developer account for the Windows Store. Like every app
store out there you will have to register, pay a developer fee, and work through a submission
process in order to launch your game. Fortunately, submitting to the Windows Store is a
From here you will need to register as a developer. I suggest getting a Microsoft Outlook ac-
count before registering. You may have already done this when setting up Windows 8 on
your computer. This will allow you to keep your PCs in sync and keep all your account in-
formation in one place. Likewise, you can use this account to log into everything you need
on Microsoft's developer accounts and resources.
When you are ready to continue with the registration you will have to pay a small fee. The
registration fee for individuals is $49, with a $99 fee for companies. The revenue share is 70
percent to the developer, but when an app achieves $25,000 in revenue—aggregated across
all sales in every market—that changes to 80 percent revenue share for the rest of the life-
time of the app. So, unlike other markets, the more you sell on the Windows Store the higher
your revenue share goes, which is a great deal!
After paying the fee, you should be all set with a developer account and ready to publish
your first game.
Reserving Your Game's Name
It's important to reserve your game's name as soon as you have a developer account. These
names are unique in the store, similar to domain names, so if you want to make sure your
game's name doesn't get taken you should register it quickly. Also, you can register multiple
app names, so don't feel pressured if you haven't finished your other game ideas yet. Simply
select the option to create a new App in the developer dashboard and you can begin the pro-
cess of registering your game's name, see
Figure 6-1
. After you have reserved your game's
