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Set up PlayFab and Steam to enable purchases

This tutorial shows you how to successfully integrate both PlayFab and Steam in a way that it allows for purchase flows to work and the redemption of items purchased.

Prerequisites

  1. A Title in PlayFab's Game Manager.
  2. An app already created and available in Steamworks.
  3. An existing integration between the selected Title and Steam, for which you can see Marketplace integration: Steam.

Note

You can find a high level overview of the steps required to make this integration work from Steam's perspective in Steam's documentation.

Step 1: Create item definitions

You need to start by creating and uploading some item definitions.

Once you have created your item definition and saved your JSON file, you can navigate to your app's Inventory Service and upload your item definition here by following the next steps:

  1. Navigate to Steamworks.
  2. Select "Apps & Packages" > "All Applications" from the top navigation menu.
  3. Select your desired app from the list of "All Apps."
  4. Scroll down and select "Edit Steamworks Settings" under "Technical Tools."
  5. Select "Community" > "Inventory Service."
  6. Navigate to the "Item Definitions" section and browse for your desired item definition JSON file.
  7. Select "Upload."

Your item definition schema should look something like this:

{
  "appid": "452820",
  "itemdefid": "300",
  "Timestamp": "2024-09-09T19:28:27Z",
  "modified": "20240909T192827Z",
  "date_created": "20240909T192827Z",
  "type": "item",
  "display_type": "",
  "name": "Bag of 300 Gold",
  "price": "1;VLV0",
  "quantity": 1,
  "description": "A super awesome bag of 300 gold!",
  "background_color": "3C352E",
  "name_color": "7D6D00",
  "promo": "owns:3223900",
  "tradable": false,
  "marketable": false,
  "commodity": false
}

Once your item definition is uploaded, it should appear as in the next screenshot:

Steam uploaded item definition

Note

You can learn more about item definition schemas in Steamworks Documentation.

Step 2: Enable Inventory Service

Now that you have your item definitions uploaded, you must turn on your app's Inventory Service. This action can be done through the same page in which you uploaded your item definitions by:

  1. Navigating to the "Inventory Service" page for your app through the URL: https://partner.steamgames.com/apps/inventoryservice/{YourAppID}.
  2. Enabling Inventory Service by checking the "Enable Inventory Service" checkbox.

Enable inventory service checkbbox

Step 3: Set an Asset Server Key

Once Inventory Service is enabled, you must make sure that your Asset Server Key is set. This Key must match your Publisher Web API Key created during your initial integration, specifically Step 2 of the Steam Integration documentation.

Note

You can also follow the steps listed in Steam's documentation to Create a Publisher Web API Key.

Once you have your Publisher Web API Key follow the next steps to set it as the Asset Server Key:

  1. Navigate to your app's "Economy Settings" under the "Community" tab, or by following the URL https://partner.steamgames.com/apps/economy/{YourAppID}
  2. Scroll until you see the Asset Server Key field and add your Publisher Web API Key.

Step 4: Create and map PlayFab items

Now that you have Inventory Service enabled for your Steam app, and your item definition uploaded, it's time to go into Game Manager and configure your items.

For more information about creating a new item, see our documentation.

After your item was created, you must now add this item to a new (or existing) Bundle. If this is your first time creating a Bundle, you can refer to our tutorial: Set up a PlayFab bundle that can be purchased from Google Play Store for information on creating a new Bundle and adding items to a Bundle.

Once your Item and Bundle have been created, you must now link the Bundle to the item definition you submitted to Steam. To do this, you must make note of the itemdefid you gave your item in your item definition JSON.

itemdefid in item definition

From the screenshot above, you can see that the itemdefid of our item is 300, now you must navigate to your Bundle in Game Manager in edit mode, and scroll down to the Marketplace Mapping section of your Bundle.

In here, you must select Steam as your Marketplace, input 300 as your Marketplace ID, and select the plus sign right next to the Marketplace ID field to lock in your changes. Once this is done, you're free to Save.

marketplace mapping

Step 5: Authenticate your player

Before moving on to redeeming your purchased item, you must ensure that the player looking to redeem the item is properly authenticated in your app, for which you must use LoginWithSteam.

After a successful call to PlayFab's LoginWithSteam you get a 200 response that includes an EntityToken that you have to use in your redemption call.

Step 6: Redeem a purchase

With Steam set up, your player authenticated using PlayFab's LoginWithSteam API and your bundle mapped to the item definition, you can now make the redemption call to Steam. For this, we use the RedeemSteamInventoryItems API call.

For this API call to work successfully, you must make sure to include the EntityToken returned in Step 5 after your player was successfully authenticated, as part of the headers in the API call.

The way redemption works for Steam is that once the RedeemSteamInventoryItems call is made, it goes through all Steam's inventory looking for the matching itemdefid and redeems it.

A successful response includes a 200 status code alongside other data part of the RedeemSteamInventoryItemsResponse such as TransactionIds, and lists of failed or successful redemptions.

Each redemption action will also trigger a corresponding event in the player's transaction history that can be retrieved from the Transaction history (V2) tab under the specified player's overview page.

Alongside the record in the player's transaction history, a PlaySteam event is also triggered and logged. You can access these logs for your Title by going into the Data page under the Analyze section of the left navigation bar in Game Manager. Here you can edit queries to search for specific records or run it with the default settings to get everything. There should be a record under the Event name of items_redeemed.

Note

You may see more than one items_redeemed PlayStream event logged, this is because even though you may have redeemed just one bundle, the number of events corresponds to the number of items within each bundle.

Note

If you look at other redemption tutorials such as Set up a PlayFab bundle that can be purchased from Google Play Store or Set up an In-App Purchase using PlayFab and the Apple App Store you may notice there's an additional step after redemption, called Consumption or Finalize Transaction respectively.

In Steam's case, consumption is done when the RedeemSteamInventoryItems API call is made, so there's no need for any additional steps after redeeming items. Nonetheless, it's worth noting that because consumption is made automatically during a successful redemption, the items matching the itemdefid will not longer be available in Steam's inventory.

Step 7: DLC and promo items

Steam DLC (Downloadable Content) is a system PlayFab doesn't currently integrate with. We suggest developers use Steam promo rules to grant inventory items from an app ownership perspective.

This means that before making a redemption call using RedeemSteamInventoryItems, you must call AddPromoItems from the Steam client using their SDK.

AddPromoItems checks the promo:owns:ID and confirms it exists in the player's owned apps (for example, DLC). If so, then it adds the item in itemdefs with the promo rule to Steam's inventory. Redemption will then add the item in Steam's inventory that matches the itemdefid.

Note

We don't currently support subscriptions.

Note

To learn more about item definitions, see ItemDef Schema Overview.

See also