A 50-item checklist for your Steam store page

This applies to anyone about to open a page or fix the page they already have. A player looks at your page for 30-45 seconds on average, and in that time they are hunting for answers to five questions: what kind of game is this, what do I do, what makes it different, is it quality or is it garbage, is it active or is it dead. Everything below turns around those five questions. I am giving 50 of them for now, as a first pass.

FIRST PUBLISH

1. Open the page the week you decide to make the game, the moment you have enough concept screenshots in hand
2. If it has any potential to go viral, the page has to be up first. And do not forget that from the moment the game goes viral you have very little time to finish it
3. The page keeps collecting wishlists while you are developing the game, even if it is only 1-2 of them
4. Page review takes 3-5 business days, so send it at least 7 days before the date you want it live
5. If you are opening a page for a demo, the same process applies
6. The game has to be public for at least 2 weeks. The earliest you can release is 14 days after the day you make the page public
7. There is no such thing as the better I open the page, the better my wishlist baseline will be. Unless you do marketing, nobody will see your page. Luck is a part of marketing too
8. As soon as the page is up, send a basic build that contains what the About This Game section says and get it through the review process. Same goes for the demo
9. Once the page and the build have passed review, you do not need to go into review again
10. If the game is going to be Early Access, prepare a roadmap, but put it under About This Game. Put it on top and the player starts reading the plan before they even understand what the game is
11. If you make the Early Access decision after you have passed review, you get put through review again
12. You can start marketing before the page is 100% ready, in its rough state. The player is coming from another channel anyway, so they arrive already convinced
13. If Steam’s algorithms are coming into play, the page has to be 100% ready so you win over as many players as you can. This part is the players who are not convinced in advance and who turn up at random through Steam. Personal Calendar and so on
14. If you want a publisher, it is better to prepare a trailer before the page. With a good trailer you can hedge for the publisher you want. Opening the page and the rest of it is then up to them

TAGS

15. You can set 20 tags. The first 5 tags are the ones that affect your visibility in the store, and the 5 after that decide which games you stand next to in the general categories. From the 11th tag on it gets more niche and properly targeting focused
16. Do not put tags like Indie, Singleplayer and Casual up front. Everybody has them, they distinguish nothing, and they say not one thing about your game to the algorithm. Push them down
17. Do not use the tags to plainly describe the game. Find at least 10 similar games and produce a fusion tag order out of them. Games between 500-1000 reviews help more than games with 30k reviews
18. Players add tags too and the weights drift over time, so open your page at least once every 2 weeks and look at where the order has gone
19. Look at the Similarly Tagged Games list. If the games you are targeting do not come up there, your tag set has drifted

SHORT DESCRIPTION

20. Make it clear from the first sentence what you are. This is where you set the player’s expectation
21. The sentences after that have to be what the player will feel in the game and the things that separate your game from the others. Use as many verbs as you can. Example: “shoot the rebels, upgrade your arsenal, survive in endless chaos”
22. Do not repeat the game’s name in the short description, it is already sitting in the title. Avoid vague verbs too, lines like fight against evil or save the world say nothing at all to the player
23. The short description is capped at 300 characters, do not try to fit the whole game in there. If you are going to localise it, stay in the 200-250 band, because when a translation runs long it gets cut off on the store page
24. Localise everything on the page up front. Localisation done with AI wipes the floor with no localisation
25. You cannot put another game’s name in the short description. If you want to liken yourself to another game you can use a metaphor for it, but I do not really recommend it. Example: “Like the Legendary FPS”
26. The bigger you make the promise, the lower your credibility goes, because a bigger promise asks for more proof

ABOUT THIS GAME

27. The part that is seen here before anyone presses Read More is the most important part. Build your whole plan around it
28. Put the game’s one sentence hook at the very top as a PNG, in big, good looking type. This becomes your 2nd point of attention and it sets up everything they read afterwards. For an example you can look at Wartide or DriveWave
29. The visual always comes ahead of the text. The more explanatory your videos are, the better, and the less text you need
30. This section used to take only GIFs, now it accepts WebM as well. The video format is smaller and smoother. Avoid GIFs as much as you can, they load slowly
31. This section’s job is what the player, on this page, sees themselves doing in the game
32. List 4 features at most, and back every feature you give with visuals. Put in more than that and you lose the player
33. Do not leave your News area dead. Post a short update every two or three weeks, that is the signal that the page is alive

CAPSULES

34. The game logo has to be readable at all times and it has to separate clearly from the background. Use a black gradient or a vignette where you need to
35. Game logos work best in white and near-white colours
36. When you design the capsules, try to avoid blue and its shades. The Steam interface is blue, so it blends into the background
37. Put a 5px border around the capsules and you can make the capsule separate from the Steam interface and pop. But do not use it as a plain frame. Design it around the game’s colours and elements
38. The Header and Small capsules are the most seen ones. Be extra sure those two are readable

SCREENSHOTS AND TRAILER

39. The first 4 screenshots show in the hover tip, so the player sees them without ever entering your page. Those four are your most critical frames
40. At least five screenshots, at least 1920x1080 and 16:9
41. The total size of all your screenshots and GIFs has to stay under 15MB, the page opening fast depends on it
42. The page background is optional and 1438x810. If you do not put one in, Valve produces it from your last screenshot
43. Screenshots change by genre, and a frame that works in one genre can kill the page when you put it in another. For example shots with no UI in an RTS, or UI heavy shots in an FPS
44. Do not put the main menu, the logo screen or an empty character pose in a screenshot. No debug text and no work in progress stamp left in them either
45. Very dark frames die at small sizes, make sure the subject reads
46. What you show in the trailer’s first five seconds has to be the thing the game does best. This is your hook
47. Players do not watch the trailer in one go, they watch it by scrubbing. Think of them as skipping every 5-6 seconds. Showing a different feature every 5-10 seconds is essential
48. Everything you promise in the trailer should be in the demo and in the game. With the same visuals
49. Keep the trailer gameplay focused at all times. Cinematics are of no use at all at this scale and they create expectations you do not need
50. If you absolutely want a logo in the trailer, put it at the very end. Putting it at the very start is amateur hour unless you are Rockstar