Steam capsule art: the only test that counts is your thumbnail at 231px

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you commission that gorgeous 1232px key art: almost no one ever sees it at that size. When a stranger meets your game in search, in Top Sellers, in New Releases, or in their Discovery Queue, Steam shows them a thumbnail about 231 pixels wide — sometimes half that. That little box is your game's entire first impression. If your capsule falls apart at thumbnail size, the rest of your Steam store page never gets a chance.

The number that matters: 231px, not 460

Steam asks you to upload the small capsule at 462×174 px. But that's the file, not the view. On a standard (non-retina) screen that asset displays at roughly 231×87 — and Steam shrinks it further, auto-generating a 184×69 and a 120×45 version for tighter rows. The 120px one is about the size of a fingernail.

Steam's own documentation is blunt about what this means: "Small Capsule should contain readable logo, even at smallest size. In most cases, this means your logo should nearly fill the small capsule." Two things worth pulling out of that.

First, you design at 462 but you should judge at 231 and below. A capsule that only works at full size is a capsule that fails where it counts. Second, Valve literally says your logo should nearly fill the box — not sit tastefully in a corner. Small-capsule space is brutal, and the title is the one thing that has to survive.

While we're here — the full set of graphical assets

You'll mostly obsess over the small capsule, but it helps to know the whole set. Steam calls these your graphical assets, each has fixed dimensions, and Valve hands you layered templates with the text-safe zones marked.

Keep the four looking like the same game — same palette, same logo treatment — so people start to recognise you across the store. That's cheap brand recognition, and it compounds every time someone sees your game. There's also a set of library assets (the images you see after you own a game), but those don't win you a first click, so they live in the store page guide.

Why the tiny version is the whole game

It's tempting to treat the capsule as decoration and pour your energy into the trailer. In my experience that's backwards. People see the capsule first — before the trailer, before the screenshots, before a single word of your description.

Chris Zukowski ran observation studies watching people shop on Steam and found that a good capsule acts like a "mouse magnet" — shoppers can't help hovering over it, which pops the tooltip with your screenshots and tags. A dull or amateur-looking capsule doesn't get the hover, so it doesn't get the click. The capsule is the gate. Everything else on your page is behind it.

Two real before-and-afters make the point. Both are single games and self-reported, so treat them as illustrations, not laws of physics — but they point the same way.

Imagine Earth. In Early Access their capsule was selling 0–3 copies a day. A year in, the devs swapped only the capsule art — nothing else — and daily sales jumped to 40–60 and stayed there. Roughly a 20× step, and you can see the exact day it changed in their sales graph. The capsule didn't invent demand; the game was already good. It just stopped hiding it.

Clanfolk. The original capsule was, in Zukowski's words, "a moldy piece of bread." The streamer SplatterCat covered the game anyway because it was fun, pulled ~74k views, but the video underperformed — and he complained publicly that the capsule was "a nightmare to thumb... I just flat out gave up." After a redesign, a later re-cover by the same streamer got 230% more views.

Streamers reuse your capsule as their thumbnail. A weak one doesn't just cost you clicks on Steam — it quietly suppresses the reach of everyone who covers you.

The shrink-test: five checks before you upload

This is the part to actually use. None of it needs fancy tools — you can do all of it in whatever you already have open. Run these on your draft before you commit.

One freedom most devs don't use: Steam explicitly says the small capsule's art does not have to match your header or main capsule. So make a dedicated small version — crop tighter, enlarge the logo, quiet the background — instead of shrinking your big art and hoping. Most muddy small capsules are just the header scaled down. A separate crop is the fix. Balatro is the poster child for getting this right: a card, bold type, a dark field, legible at any size.

The rules that quietly cost you visibility

Since September 2022, Valve limits what can go on a base capsule. This trips up a lot of new devs, because the instinct when you want to stand out is to slap a "9/10" or an award laurel on the art. Don't — it now works against you.

Base capsules may contain only your game artwork, the game's name, and an official subtitle. Not allowed:

• No review scores, Steam or press
• No award names, symbols, or laurels
• No discount copy ("On Sale Now", "-90%")
• No text or art promoting a different product — including your own sequel
• No other stray text

The penalty isn't a slap on the wrist. Valve's wording: games that don't follow the rules "may have limits to visibility within the Steam store and will be ineligible for featuring in official Steam sales and events." That's featuring you can't buy back.

If you genuinely need to flag a big update or seasonal event, there's a proper channel: an Artwork Override, which is temporary (max one month, then auto-expires) and must be localized into every language your game supports. And your review quotes and awards do have a home — the Accolades section of your store page, which is built exactly for that.

If your capsule is muddy, here's the order I'd fix it in

Enlarge the logo first — that alone fixes most failed 120px tests. Then quiet the area behind the title, either with a darker gradient or by cropping to a simpler part of the art. Then check contrast in grayscale. Then, if it's still fighting you, make a separate small-capsule crop instead of scaling the big one down.

The capsule is the smallest, most-seen image you'll ever make for your game. Worth getting the small version right. :)

Common questions

Sources

• Steamworks — Store Graphical Assets (capsule sizes, small-capsule rules, good/poor example)
• Steamworks — Graphical Asset Rules (Sept 2022 content rules, Artwork Overrides)
• Chris Zukowski — How one new image increased sales 20-fold (Imagine Earth)
• Chris Zukowski — Get a better capsule (Clanfolk, streamers)
• Chris Zukowski — What is a normal click-through rate on Steam? (100+ game survey)