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Christopher Clogg avatar image
Christopher Clogg asked

Handling Steam demo + main game login

Hi, we are currently using Steam login with Playfab as our account system and it is working well. However we are adding a demo, which requires a new Steam app ID, and thus cannot work with our existing Playfab title. Unfortunately, we have tons of items in the catalog and other things which we need from our main title (in the demo too)

Our idea thus far has been to simply make demo users have anonymous device-based accounts (if the Steam API's "CheckAppOwnership" returns the demo)... They would earn items and w/e else on that account. And then if they were to buy the full game, app-start would detect ownership of the main Steam app, and somehow merge into a Steam-linked account.

What is the best way to do that last step? We would like the anonymous account to become a Steam-linked account. Do we use loginWithSteam or LinkSteamAccount? Also we had a free weekend a while ago, would there be a conflict with some existing Steam-based Playfab accounts?

Thanks!

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Christopher Clogg avatar image Christopher Clogg commented ·

Side note: I guess the demo would need to save their anonymous playfab login 'customid' to steam cloud, so when the main game is bought and ran, it can detect that they had a demo account that had some progress. (and login via that custom ID and then perform the link steam account)

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Seth Du avatar image
Seth Du answered

For the Demo part, you can use Steam account to login, so that you have a player account in demo PlayFab title with steam account linked. Make sure all the data players create in the game is in Player Data(Publisher).

When user login into full version of game, you just use the other PlayFab title and login with the same steam account. Player Data (Publisher) will automatically migrate to current title. So basically you should not worry about any data issue, and they won’t conflict.

Player Data (Publisher) is shared within a studio, you can create multiple titles and player accounts using the same ID(for example custom ID) within shares Master Player Account information and the Player Data (Publisher).

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Christopher Clogg avatar image Christopher Clogg commented ·

Ah interesting, but this means that players on the demo game won't have access to my original title's catalog right? We need that to display items ingame.

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brendan avatar image brendan Christopher Clogg commented ·

The essential issue is that there's a one-to-one relationship between the Title ID of the game in PlayFab and the App ID of the game in Steam. So if you have to have two separate App IDs, they're necessarily going to be two different PlayFab Title IDs. However, it's odd that this hasn't come up before. Are you certain that it's a hard requirement that you have the demo version of your game on a separate App ID?

If so, the thing to do would be to simply use the Game Manager's download/upload capability to copy the catalog from one title to the other.

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Christopher Clogg avatar image Christopher Clogg brendan commented ·

Yes sadly :( https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos
"Demos are created as a separate App ID as the base app."
It would be okay if we didn't have to display items and stuff in the demo. The flipside is if our game was free and then had DLC, then it's a shared app id. But a demo complicates things haha.

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