Verification

Players can fund an Encore only once it is verified: Plany has confirmed the game really is ending. Everything else — linking, transferring, creating offers, building the store into the game — can happen while it is still being checked.

Encore → Declare a game end of life → choose the game, the publisher link and the Steam app → choose what players may see → Declare end of life

The Encore is created at once in STATE_VERIFYING. The evidence is gathered in the background, usually within a minute, and the Encore moves on its own.

• game must be one of your account's own games in the Game Registry.
• listing must be one of the link's listings.
• funding_visibility is required. See Funding.

The Encore carries its encore_key — the handle your game ships, printed by plany encore key example-arena. See Offers and purchases.

Two outcomes, never three

What is checked

Three signals.

A game is verified automatically when ownership is confirmed and at least one of the other two says it is ending:

Ownership is required because without it nothing else found is about you: a stranger could name a delisted game they do not own and collect its players' money.

A game listed as coming soon reads as on sale. Not released is not end of life.

Announcements, and the quote

Only posts in your app's steam_community_announcements feed are read — never news sites syndicated into it. "A journalist wrote that it is shutting down" is not the studio saying so.

Plany reads up to twenty of your most recent posts, looking for one that says the game's online service is ending: official servers shutting down, support ending, the game being retired or delisted with its servers going offline. A sale ending, a season ending, a maintenance window or a sequel announcement do not count.

Only your own words count. A finding must quote one sentence from the post, and that sentence is checked against the post — ignoring case, whitespace, markup and curly quotes, and nothing else. A paraphrase is not evidence, so the evidence you see is always a sentence you actually published.

When the store alone already verifies an owned game, your announcements are not read at all.

The evidence

A verified or reviewed Encore carries what was found:

1"verification": {
2  "summary": "The developer has announced the end of the game, and the linked publisher owns it.",
3  "evidence": [
4    { "kind": "KIND_OWNERSHIP", "detail": "the linked publisher key can act for this game" },
5    {
6      "kind": "KIND_ANNOUNCEMENT",
7      "url": "https://steamstore-a.akamaihd.net/news/externalpost/steam_community_announcements/…",
8      "quote": "The official servers for Example Arena will shut down on 30 November.",
9      "detail": "the developer's own announcement, giving 30 November"
10    }
11  ],
12  "unknown_signals": [],
13  "decided_by": "encore.plany.cloud",
14  "decide_time": "2026-09-15T12:00:00Z"
15}

decided_by is encore.plany.cloud for an automatic decision, or the operator who made it.

A signal that could not be read is not a signal that fell short

Steam rate-limits the store, or the news feed times out. Each of those is unknown, and an unknown is never evidence in either direction — it cannot verify a game, and it does not count against one.

Unknown signals are listed by name in unknown_signals — ownership, store, announcements — and in the summary, so the person reviewing knows the difference between "the store says it is on sale" and "we could not ask the store".

An Encore waiting on review because something could not be read is checked again on its own a day later, and again each day after that for up to a week. It may verify itself without anybody touching it; a person can decide sooner.

Review

STATE_NEEDS_REVIEW puts the Encore in a queue at Plany. A person reads the summary and the evidence and decides:

• Approve — the Encore becomes STATE_VERIFIED, with a KIND_OPERATOR evidence entry.
• Decline — the Encore becomes STATE_DECLINED, and verification.reason holds the reviewer's own sentence, shown to you as written.

Nothing about a game in review is blocked except players buying: transfer it, price it and ship the store while you wait. A game's store can list its offers before launch; they are simply not purchasable yet.

Trying again

plany encore retry-verification example-arena

For an Encore in STATE_NEEDS_REVIEW or STATE_DECLINED. It returns to STATE_VERIFYING, the evidence is gathered again from scratch, and the same rules apply. Anything else is refused with NOT_RETRYABLE.

An Encore a person has declined always goes back to a person when retried, with the fresh evidence in front of them — it cannot verify itself past an earlier decision.

The usual reasons to retry: you have now posted the announcement, you have delisted the game, or you rotated a key that had lost access to the app.

Revoked

A verified Encore can be withdrawn by Plany — a game that turned out not to be ending after all — and becomes STATE_REVOKED, with the reason in verification.reason.

• Player purchases stop at once. Games see ENCORE_NOT_VERIFIED.
• Credit already bought stays in the project and keeps paying for its servers.

States