16 Jul 2026 · 5 min read
Most developers guess at what a Steam store broadcast is allowed to show, and the guess is usually too cautious. Valve publishes the actual rules in its Steamworks broadcast FAQ, and they are looser than most people assume. Here is what that document actually says, with the handful of real limits called out plainly rather than buried.
Before any content question comes up, there is a gate most developers hit first: the account trying to broadcast has to qualify to broadcast at all. This is a separate document from the FAQ - Valve's setup guide at partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/broadcast/setting_up - and it is where the single most common complaint on Steam's own forums comes from: "your account does not have sufficient privileges to broadcast live streams." That error is not a bug. It means one of four requirements below is not met.
The account has to be non-limited. Steam applies its "Limited account" status to accounts that have never spent money on the platform, and a limited account cannot broadcast. Clearing that status just takes a lifetime total of $5 USD spent anywhere on Steam - not $5 on the game you are broadcasting, just $5 spent, ever. If you are setting this up on a fresh account made purely to run broadcasts, that is the first thing to check, because it fails silently otherwise: you configure everything correctly and it still refuses to go live.
The account also needs explicit broadcast permission, and there are two separate ways to get it: either "Broadcast Live" permission granted in Steamworks, or membership in the Store Broadcast Beta group. Either one satisfies the requirement; you do not need both.
Then there is ownership of the game itself, and Valve accepts three different forms of it: a normal license from buying the game or redeeming a product key, membership in the Steamworks Partner Group for that title with access granted, or - for a game that has not released yet - a release-override license issued specifically to let you show it early. Any one of the three is enough; which one applies to you depends on whether you are broadcasting your own unreleased title or a game you own as a player.
Last, the account cannot be Community Banned. This one is absolute and there is no workaround listed for it - a banned account does not broadcast, regardless of what else is in order.
All four have to hold at once. Miss any one of them and the practical result is the same generic privileges error, which is why it is worth checking all four in order rather than assuming it is the App ID or the whitelist - those are separate problems, covered further down.
Once the account itself qualifies, most of what you can actually show is on the permitted side - a longer list than the caution most developers apply to it.
Pre-recorded video is fine. Valve's own FAQ answers the question directly: "Absolutely." You do not need a live camera or a live gameplay session running behind the feed. A rendered trailer, an office tour, footage of your development team at work - all of it counts, and none of it needs a person sitting at a keyboard while it plays. That is the whole premise behind looping a video onto a store page instead of running a live capture around the clock; see what are Steam store broadcasts for the basics, or is looping a pre-recorded video allowed on Steam? for the question answered on its own.
Replays of streams that were previously live are allowed too, with one condition: they need to be labeled, specifically, as "Re-Broadcast." Valve treats that as a labeling requirement, not a ban on rebroadcasting something that already aired - so a strong past stream does not have to disappear from your page the moment it ends, it just cannot be presented as if it is happening live right now.
Overlaying your own username or handle - or one from another platform, if you are cross-posting the same feed - is also allowed on the video itself. Combined with the next point, that means a feed built for Twitch or YouTube, branding included, does not need to be stripped down before it goes on Steam.
You can also send the identical feed to Twitch, YouTube, Facebook and Steam at the same time. Steam does not require exclusivity, so there is no rule against running the same broadcast everywhere else you already publish. If you are already streaming gameplay elsewhere, nothing about Steam's rules forces you to produce a separate feed just for the store page.
There is no cap on how long or how often you can broadcast. Valve's phrasing is blunt: "You can stream as often and as long as you want." Nothing in the FAQ limits a broadcast to a certain number of hours a day or a week, which is what makes a genuinely 24/7 store page broadcast possible at all, rather than something you switch on for a few hours and then have to remember to restart. Valve does address one specific timing case: if you have tied a broadcast to a scheduled event, the stream is allowed to keep running for up to 24 hours past that event's listed end time, so a broadcast does not need to be cut off the instant the scheduled window closes.
Unreleased games qualify as well. A title that only has a Coming Soon page can still broadcast, so there is no need to wait for launch day to put a video on your store page. That matters most in the run-up to a launch or a festival, when a store page with motion on it is doing more work than one that just sits still.
The FAQ is short on content rules, but the one it states is absolute: what you show has to match your game's maturity rating on Steam, and "Adult Only content is not allowed." It is worth being precise about what that restriction attaches to, because it is easy to misread as a rule about the footage. It is actually a rule about the game: an Adult Only-rated game cannot be broadcast on the store at all, full stop, regardless of what the specific clip shows in that moment. A Mature-rated game, on the other hand, can show Mature content on its broadcast without issue - the content just has to sit inside the rating the game already carries.
So the practical read is: check your game's own rating, not the clip you are about to loop. If the game is rated Adult Only, there is no version of its broadcast that is allowed, no matter how it is edited. If it is rated anything else, the ceiling is whatever that rating already permits, and Valve does not layer a second, stricter set of content categories on top of it specifically for broadcasts.
A single broadcast can showcase more than one title. If you cut between games during a stream, Valve expects the Broadcast App ID to be updated as the game on screen changes, so the App ID always matches what is actually showing. Before any of that, the game has to be whitelisted for broadcasting through a broadcast event or your Steamworks partner settings, and your broadcast settings need to name the right App ID.
This is the rule most worth writing down, because it is not a content restriction at all - it is a bookkeeping one, and it is the difference between a broadcast that quietly shows on the wrong store page and one that shows where you intended. If you swap games mid-stream and forget to update the App ID, the feed can end up associated with the wrong title, which defeats the point of putting it on your store page in the first place. Getting that pairing wrong is a common reason a broadcast does not show up correctly - if yours is not appearing where expected, troubleshooting a Steam broadcast and setting up your stream key both cover this setup end.
One timing detail worth knowing: changing the Broadcast App ID takes effect immediately on your end, but the store page itself can lag before it catches up and reflects the change. If you switch games and the store page still shows the previous title for a short while afterward, that is expected propagation delay, not a sign that the change failed - give it a moment before assuming something is broken and re-doing the setting.
Valve's FAQ names the two reasons a broadcast fails to appear on a store page more often than any other. Both are things covered above, but they are worth isolating because they are the first two things to check, in order, before assuming something more exotic is wrong.
The first is that the streaming account is not whitelisted for that specific game - the broadcast event or Steamworks partner setting that ties your account to that title was never completed, or was completed for a different App ID than the one you are actually streaming. The second is that the Broadcast App ID is not set at all, or is set to the wrong value. Both produce the same symptom from where you are sitting: the stream is live, everything looks fine on your end, and the store page simply does not show it.
Neither of these is the eligibility check from earlier - an account can pass every one of the four privilege requirements and still fail here, because whitelisting and the App ID are set per game, not per account. Passing the account-level check gets you the ability to broadcast something; these two settings determine whether that something lands on the store page you meant it for.
Only public streams appear on your store page. A friends-only broadcast will not display there, so visibility is not just a viewing preference - it decides whether the broadcast does its job at all. It is worth checking this setting specifically if you have followed every other rule here and the broadcast still is not showing: a correctly whitelisted, correctly rated, correctly App ID'd stream still will not appear if it is not set to public.
Steam also does not save or archive what was streamed. Once the broadcast ends, nothing is kept on Valve's side, so any record of what aired is on you, not Steam. If you want a copy of a broadcast for your own records, or to reuse as a labeled replay, keep the source file yourself - there is nothing to retrieve from Steam afterward.
VR games can broadcast the same as any other title - nothing in the rules above changes for a VR store page. Valve's own guidance recommends using a third-party tool like OBS rather than Steam's native controls, specifically for finer control over the stream. Worth knowing before you assume the built-in path is the easier one for a VR title; it may just be the less controllable one.
On advertising, running ads in the video feed is technically allowed - Valve does not prohibit it outright - but the FAQ explicitly discourages it, calling it "bad user experience." There is no formal policy beyond that line: no explicit ban, no defined limit on ad length or frequency, nothing that says how many is too many. Where the FAQ is silent, we are not going to invent a rule on Valve's behalf: read "discouraged" as exactly that - technically permitted, actively advised against - not as quietly banned. If a rule is not written down, the FAQ linked below is the only place to check before you assume one exists.
None of this replaces reading Valve's own page - the source is the Steamworks broadcast FAQ. If you already have a stream key whitelisted and want a loop running instead of a live capture, that setup is in setting up your stream key.
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