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 painless process, and it all starts by creating your developer account here.

From here you will need to register as a developer. I suggest getting a Microsoft Outlook account 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 information 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 lifetime 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 ...

Get Releasing HTML5 Games for Windows 8 now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.