Steam overlay works in Standalone, but not Shipping

I followed the documentation for integrating Steam with my project so I can start implementing achievements. I’m using binary Unreal 4.22.3. My game has a Steam page with a valid app ID.

My problem is that when I launch the game in Standalone, the Steam overlay works fine and correctly shows the name of the game etc., but when I package the game in Shipping configuration and launch the .exe, the Steam overlay does not appear.

I’ve seen various suggestions that include manually creating the steam_appid.txt file and adding the Steam API and client .dll files to my shipping game folder, but this hasn’t worked for me.

It’s worth noting that my game was uploaded to Steam using SDK 1.42, and binary Unreal is using SDK 1.39 (it doesn’t seem like I can change this), but I’m not sure if that would be related. There are no warnings related to Steam or the Online Subsystem in the output log when I package the game.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Ah, I managed to fix this by creating steam_appid.txt in the [Game]/Binaries/Win64 directory instead of the root directory.

However, the official documentation states that “the file should not be included in any Steam images.” Does this mean creating this file manually is the wrong approach? If so, how would users be able to launch the game outside of Steam and still use Steam features like the overlay?

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