Steamworks Documentation
Updating Game Build
For an overview on updating your game, please see Updating Your Game - Best Practices. What follows are technical topics related to updating your game.

Testing

Before deploying your update, you'll probably want to make sure you test it yourself from a Steam build. There are a number different ways you can do this, so be sure to check out the Testing on Steam documentation.

Uploading Your Update

To update your game or software build, simply follow the same instructions for creating your initial builds in SteamPipe. Check out the SteamPipe Documentation for details.

Note that after your app releases to customers, your customers will be receiving the build marked as the Default build. In order to test your update, you should upload the new build using Steampipe, then set that build on a test branch with a password to test before moving it to the default branch. See Managing Uploaded Builds above for a refresher on managing your build branches.

Set Your Build Live

Once you've uploaded and tested your build, you're ready to make it live for players. To do so, you'll need to switch your desired build to be the new 'default' build. If you created new depots in the process of adding this new content, make sure you add that new depot to all store and key packages. See Packages documentation for more details.

Post your patchnotes

Once your update is live, players will see the game update in their Steam client. Many players will click to learn about what has just updated, so it's important that you post your patchnotes or update description with the Steam Events & Announcement tools.

This will allow your update information to appear accessible from the 'downloads' panel in the Steam client and to any customer that is following your game (which they can do from your community hub or store page), on your store page, and within the Steam library. More about Events and Announcements