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Onboarding your game

Signing the pilot agreement​

Games on Microsoft Start is currently in a pilot phase. All partners who wish to be a part of the pilot program need to sign our pilot agreement before we can proceed. Please work with your contact from Microsoft business development team to get this kicked off if you haven't yet.

Understanding the experience​

We encourage you to visit our product to get familiar with the core product experience.

Microsoft Start allows web games to run within an iframe on our site. A few things to note here -

  • Games need to be accessible through a public web URL hosted by the game developer. Microsoft might provide a hosting solution later down the road.
  • When Microsoft Start users discover and play one of the games listed on the product, our iframe will load the game's public web URL directly.
  • To ensure security and a consistent user experience, our iframe is sandboxed, which means it has blocked certain browser capabilities such as navigating away from the initial URL or popping up new browser windows.

Submitting your game​

Once you are ready to submit your game to the Microsoft Store, please follow this guide.

Update: Please submit all games as a "Game" rather than a "MSIX or PWA app"

Submit as a Game

Must haves:

  • In your PWA's app manifest, please set a top level property "ms_start_compatible" to true. This is what differentiates a normal PWA in the Microsoft Store vs the ones that would like to be listed on Microsoft Start.
  • Please include the follow assets:
    • Square image: 512x512 (this should be the default in the manifest)
    • 16:9 image: 1920x1080 or higher resolution
  • In the MS Store submission, please set the "Short Title" property to what you want the game display name to be on Microsoft Start. This is what we will be using on our platform.

Once your app submission is reviewed and approved, you should make sure to make it publicly visible in the Microsoft Store. Proceed to the next step once this is done.

Getting ready to launch​

Once you have published your game in the Microsoft Store, visit our Onboarding Portal to onboard your game to our ecosystem.

Welcome screen​

Login screen

  • Enter details of the game to login and manage the game. The Publisher Id and Product Id (also called Store Id) the ones you recieve on the Partner Center.
  • Note: For now we will be generating the API Key for all game developers as they onboard. Soon we will have the ability to generate the API Key through a UX.

Enter game information​

  • The next step is to select the Genre of the game, and how you want to submit the game.
  • If you would like to continue hosting your game you can submit the game URL.
  • If you want to host your game (client-side only) with Microsoft, you can submit a Zip file of the minifed game files and assets (please ensure the game has an index.html file).
  • Once you submit, we will run validation of the game and assets.

Manage hosted game​

  • If you have previously hosted a game, then upon logging in you will see your past versions with options to delete, or submit previous versions to move to live.
  • You can still upload new versions at this point, and only the selected game will be added to our game queue. Failed validation

Failed validation​

Failed validation

  • Error messages will inform you why the validation failed and what needs to be fixed.
  • Once the errors have been addressed, you can resubmit on the previous screen.

Passed validation​

Passed validation

  • Once validation passes, you will be given a dev playground test link and you can use it to validate the game within our environment.
  • Keep in mind that our sandboxed iframe has restricted some browser capabilties so you need to test thorougly to make sure all the in-game experiences work well inside of our iframe.
  • Once the game has been thoroughly tested, accept the checkbox and select 'Mark as ready', confirming that the game is good to be launched on the game page.

Submitting game for final review​

Added to game queue

  • Congrats! Your game has now been submitted to us for a final review, before being onboarded to our ecosystem.
  • We will inform you incase there is something else we might need to onboard the game.
  • After the final review, we will start the process to launch the game.

What to expect next​

In the first couple of days after we launch the game, please expect low traffic as our recommendation model is still starting to pick it up. Traffic will gradually ramp up if the game is performing well.

We will closely monitor the health of the game, and schedule a time with you to discuss learnings and next steps.