Tutorials - Removing Steam Easily

A lot of folks like to ship on other platforms like Playstation, XBox, Switch, Itch.io, etc. Removing deeply embedded Steamworks stuff can be a pain and some have opted to keep separate repositories for their game's Steam version. However, there is an alternative to this: programmatically ignoring the Steamworks bits. Below are some examples shared by users in our Discord.

Albey shared some scripts for his solution in GDScript and there are three separate files. The SteamHandler.gd file which swaps out which version of the game this is:


extends Node

var interface: SteamIntegrationBlank

func _ready() -> void:
  if OS.has_feature("Steam"):
    interface = load("res://Entities/Autoloads/Steam/SteamIntegration.gd").new()
  else:
    interface = load("res://Entities/Autoloads/Steam/SteamIntegrationBlank.gd").new()

  interface.initialise_steam()
  if interface.status != interface.STATUS_OK:
    get_tree().quit()

The SteamIntegrationBlank.gd file which handles what happens when Steam is not present:


extends Reference
class_name SteamIntegrationBlank

const STATUS_OK = 1
const STATUS_STEAM_NOT_RUNNING = 20
var status := STATUS_OK

func initialise_steam() -> void:
  pass

And finally the SteamIntegration.gd file for when Steam is present:


extends SteamIntegrationBlank

const APP_ID = ***

func initialise_steam() -> void:
  if Steam.restartAppIfNecessary(APP_ID):
    status = STATUS_STEAM_NOT_RUNNING
    return

  var init: Dictionary = Steam.steamInit()
  status = init['status']

Rutger from Roost Games (maker of Cat Cafe Manager) shared a tidbit about it: "If anyone is wondering how to do that, since I had to find out through the Switch port, I have a Platform global as a wrapper for any platform specific stuff, it just does this in the _ready:". His example code is as following:


if Engine.has_singleton("Steam"):
	self.platform = "steam"
	self.Steam = Engine.get_singleton("Steam")

Hopefully these examples give you some ideas on how to remove Steamworks features from your game without having to make a bunch of different builds and repositories.