> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://seeindie.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What I check on a Steam page: the checklist I work from - URL: https://seeindie.com/blog/steam-page-audit-checklist/ - Published: 2026-09-29T11:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-04T20:29:56.000Z - Description: I don't start with an opinion, I start with a list. The checks I go through on a Steam page, in the order I go through them, and the three judgement calls no checklist can make. - Author: Isabella-Viktoria Quilez - Tags: Steam, Indie Marketing, #hub-steam, #for-games When someone sends me a Steam page and asks what's wrong with it, I don't start with an opinion. I start with a list, and I go through it in the same order every time. The order matters more than it sounds. If the tags are wrong, nobody sees the page at all, and everything else on it is decoration. So the checks that decide **whether the page gets shown** come before the checks that decide **whether the page converts**. What follows is the Steam page checklist I work from, in that order. This is the mechanical half of it, written for developers who already have a Steam page up and suspect it isn't doing its job. Every item here is something you can check yourself in an afternoon, against Valve's own documentation, without needing me or anyone else. The parts that need judgement rather than a rule are at the end, and I've said plainly what they are. On this page [Capsule](#capsule) [Tags](#tags) [Screenshots](#screenshots) [Copy](#words) [Release](#release) [Wishlists](#wishlists) [Around the page](#surfaces) ## 1\. The capsule, at the size people actually see it Almost every capsule I get sent looks fine. It looks fine because I'm looking at it in a browser tab at full width, which is the one place on Steam it never appears. ### The check: look at your capsule art at 120 pixels Shrink the small capsule to 120 pixels wide and look at it again. That number isn't arbitrary. You upload the small capsule at [462x174](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/assets/standard?ref=seeindie.com), and Valve generates the display sizes from it — **120x45 and 184x69**. Valve's own note on where those go: "various lists throughout Steam. Search results, top-sellers, new releases, etc." That covers most of the places a stranger meets your game for the first time. If the title is unreadable at 120 pixels, it is unreadable in the places that matter. ### What I'm looking for at that size - Is the title still legible, or has it turned into grey texture? - Is there one clear subject, or three overlapping ones? - Does it read as a different game from its neighbours in the same genre, or as the same game with a different logo? ### The check nobody expects to fail: what a capsule image is allowed to say Valve's asset rules limit base capsule content to "game artwork, the game name, and any official subtitle". No review scores. No award names, symbols or logos. No discount copy. No text promoting a different product. **No other miscellaneous text.** Temporary text is possible, but the opening is narrow: Valve allows it only for a major content update, a seasonal event, a battle pass, DLC or similar new content, only through an Artwork Override, only for one month at a time, and any text on the asset has to be localised into every language the game supports. I see the "Very Positive — 96%" badge baked into a capsule maybe once a month. It's a rule break, and it's the easiest fix on this entire list. ### The four assets nobody looks at until release day Everything above is the store page. There is a second set of artwork that only appears once someone owns the game, in their Steam library, and it is the single most common thing I find missing — because nothing on the store page review tells you it's missing. Valve calls these library assets, and all four are required: - **Library Capsule** — 600x900\. The one that represents the game in the library overview and in collections. - **Library Header** — 920x430\. Shows up in Recent Games and elsewhere in the client. If you don't set it, Valve falls back to your store header capsule, which is the one fallback of the four that's actually fine. - **Library Hero** — 3840x1240, with a safe area of 860x380 in the centre that survives every resize. Put nothing you care about outside it. - **Library Logo** — 1280 wide and/or 720 tall, laid over the hero. The reason this matters is what happens when the hero and logo are missing. Valve's own description: "The hero area will display a screenshot from the store, with the application name text overlaid in the bottom left corner." So the game still works, the page still looks finished, and every person who bought it sees a random screenshot with grey text dumped in the corner every time they open it. Nobody complains about this. They just quietly think the game looks cheap. The full treatment of capsule art sizes and what actually changes results is in [the capsule art post](https://seeindie.com/blog/steam-capsule-art/). ## 2\. Tags: the part that decides who ever sees the page Tags decide more than anything else on a Steam page, and developers spend the least time on them. They're also where I find real damage most often. ### The rules Valve publishes From Valve's [tag documentation](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/tags?ref=seeindie.com): - **Only the top 20 tags are visible to users and used by Steam to influence visibility.** Anything below rank 20 sits outside what Valve says it uses. - At least 5 tags are required before launch, and Valve recommends adding up to 20. - **Some store filters prioritise the first 15 tags**, so the order inside your top 20 is a real decision, not a formality. ### What I check on the tag list - Are all 20 slots used? An empty slot is free visibility left on the table. - Are the first five the ones you'd want a stranger to read as a description of the game? In practice they function as one. - Is anything in there aspirational rather than accurate? A tag that brings in the wrong audience brings in negative reviews from people who were never going to like the game. - Is anything in there so broad that you're competing with ten thousand other games for a shelf you can't win? That last one is the check that takes judgement rather than a rule, and I'll come back to it. The mechanics, including the tag wizard and how the ordering works, are in [the tags post](https://seeindie.com/blog/steam-tags/). ## 3\. Screenshots and the trailer ### The rules At least five screenshots, 1920x1080 minimum, 16:9\. And Valve is explicit that screenshots "should exclusively show the gameplay of your game" — no concept art, no pre-rendered cinematic stills, no images carrying awards or marketing copy. ### The size trap Two numbers, both from Valve's store page description documentation, and they get swapped constantly. Images placed inside the About This Game section should be "smaller than 5MB" each. Separately, Valve asks you to "keep the total file size of all your screenshots and GIFs below 15MB" so the page loads quickly. Both are worded as requests rather than hard blocks, which is exactly why nobody notices going over. ### The first screenshot, and the three after it - Does the first screenshot show the thing the game is about? Not the title screen, not the world map, not the character creator. The loop. - Could someone who has never heard of your game work out what they'd be doing, from the first three images alone? - Do the screenshots agree with the tags? A page tagged Cozy that opens with a combat log is telling two stories. - Are at least four screenshots flagged "suitable for all ages"? Valve's warning here is unusually direct: if too few are flagged, "your game may not appear in these places, even if it otherwise qualifies", including the front-page hover. It's a checkbox, and it fails without telling you. ### The trailer, and where it sits The section heading says trailer, so here is the part that actually gets audited. **Where it sits is a decision, not a default.** Valve: "The first two valid trailers will be shown to players before any screenshots, with any remaining trailers appearing after the list of screenshots." Two slots ahead of everything else, and the order is drag-and-drop. If the trailer sitting in slot one is the announcement teaser from eighteen months ago rather than the one showing the game as it is now, that is a two-minute fix with more effect than most of this list. **The format Valve asks for:** the highest resolution you have, up to 1920x1080, 30/29.97 or 60/59.94 fps, high bit rate at 5,000+ Kbps, in .mov, .wmv or .mp4\. H.264 video with AAC audio preferred, 16:9, though 4:3 is accepted. **What Valve says it should show** is blunter than most advice you'll read: "We have found that most Steam users are looking for gameplay of your game." The first trailer should show gameplay from the player's point of view, and Valve explicitly suggests leaving the in-game HUD visible so a viewer can work out fast whether this is for them. So what I check is narrow: does the first frame of the first trailer show actual gameplay, or a studio logo? Is the trailer in slot one the current one? And does someone who stops watching after fifteen seconds still know what the game is? The full Steam store page walkthrough, field by field, is in [the store page post](https://seeindie.com/blog/steam-store-page/). ## 4\. The words Two blocks of written description, two different jobs. ### The short description This is the one that travels. It appears in places where the rest of your page doesn't, and Valve's own guidance is blunt about the consequence: it is "limited to a few hundred characters and it's often read by potential players who are merely skimming through the Store to find their next game". So I check whether it says what the game **is** in the first line, or whether it opens with atmosphere and gets to the genre in sentence three. Atmosphere is not a genre. Then I check for the one thing Valve explicitly warns against and almost nobody removes: time-based text. "Don't add 'time-related' text to the short description as these will soon become old and out of date." Every "coming this winter" and "now in Early Access" written two years ago is still sitting there, quietly dating the page. ### If the game is in Early Access An Early Access page carries an extra block of required text, and it is the most reliably stale thing on Steam. Valve's questionnaire asks, among other things, "Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?" and "What is the current state of the Early Access version?" — questions whose answers were written once, at launch, and have quietly been wrong ever since. Valve's own advice is to "revisit your Early Access store page at least once a year to ensure the information presented there is still relevant and current". There is a harder edge to it as well: if the game hasn't been updated in twelve months, Steam puts a notice on the page saying so. That one you cannot write your way around. So I read the Early Access answers against the build that is actually live, and I check the date of the last update. ### The About This Game section Here I check for the opposite failure: a wall of text with no structure, no headers and no images, written as if the reader has already decided to buy. Neither of these is a rule you can break. That's exactly why they get skipped — nothing turns red, nothing blocks the review, and the page ships with first-draft copy that nobody ever revisits. ## 5\. The release plumbing This is the boring section that saves launches. ### What this list doesn't cover: the game build review One boundary before the rest. This list is about the store page. Your game build goes through a separate review, and the two are assessed independently — approval of one tells you nothing about the state of the other. If you're working towards a release date, you are waiting on both. ### The coming soon page and the review process - **Coming Soon page: at least two weeks before release.** Valve's requirement, not a suggestion. - **Store review typically takes 3-5 business days** — but Valve's own advice is to [submit at least 7 business days](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/review%5Fprocess?ref=seeindie.com) before you want the page live, to leave room for the changes they ask for. The seven is the number to plan against. The three-to-five is the number that makes people miss dates. ### The fee and the review score - **Steam Direct is $100 per app**, and it's worth knowing the exact terms: not refundable, but recoupable in the payment made after your product reaches **$1,000 Adjusted Gross Revenue** from the Steam Store or in-app purchases. Recouped against revenue, not paid back. - **Review score only becomes a visibility factor below 40%.** Valve's wording: "As long as your game's reviews are Mixed or above (40%+), review score is not a factor in algorithmic visibility." Below that, into Mostly Negative, the game becomes "less likely to be featured". Above the line, moving the percentage doesn't buy you algorithmic visibility, which is not the same as reviews not mattering. They still decide whether the person reading them buys. If you're working out the order of the whole process rather than auditing an existing page, [the publishing guide](https://seeindie.com/how-to-publish-a-game-on-steam/) is the map. ## 6\. Wishlists: what actually sends an email Wishlists are the number everyone watches and the mechanism almost nobody has read. ### What actually triggers the email Steam sends a wishlist notification when your game releases, when it moves from Early Access to full release, and when you discount it. The discount case has conditions, and all of them have to hold: - **at or above 20%** - it has to affect the lowest priced package for the game - it has to run **over 8 hours** There's also a **two-week cooldown** between notifications for the same product, and the customer has to have verified their email address. Which means a short flash sale at 15% reaches nobody, and two discounts ten days apart reach your wishlisters once. ### What I check on the wishlist side Whether the page is set up to collect wishlists at all before the game is anywhere near ready, and whether the planned discount schedule would actually trigger the emails the plan assumes it will. ## 7\. The surfaces around the page A Steam page isn't only the store page. I check three adjacent surfaces, because they're the ones that fail silently. ### Playtest If there's one attached, I check the capsules and icons first, because [Valve's store review checklist for a Playtest](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/playtest?ref=seeindie.com) "only consists of capsule images and icons" — that is the entire review. One thing I check because it genuinely can't be undone: the customer-visible name can't be changed once the Playtest is released. On keys, the thing worth knowing is that the number people quote is about the wrong app. Valve says you can't request Release State Override keys for a Playtest at all, and the "typically limited to 2,500" figure applies to your base game. Playtest keys themselves can be requested in much larger quantities, and once you want more than 50,000 of them, Valve's own line is that the playtest "is effectively an open beta" and you should feel comfortable opening signups on your store page. The judgement call of whether you want a Playtest at all is in [the Playtest post](https://seeindie.com/blog/steam-playtest/). ### Next Fest Timing, and only timing. The dates move every cycle and the deadlines that matter sit weeks before the fest itself. [The Next Fest post](https://seeindie.com/blog/steam-next-fest/) carries the current calendar. ### Press kit I check whether one exists and whether it's linked from somewhere a journalist would look. This is the item with the weakest evidence base on the whole list, and I'd rather say so: the numbers people quote about press kits mostly trace back to one industry survey (Big Games Machine, March 2024, over 150 respondents), where 72% named assets and media kits as an important factor and 67% wanted review code at least three weeks ahead. It's one survey, it's two years old, and I haven't found a newer one. [The press kit post](https://seeindie.com/blog/game-press-kit/) goes through what that survey does and doesn't support, including two widely repeated numbers that don't hold up. ## What a checklist can't tell you about your indie game Everything above is mechanical. You can do it yourself, and you should — it's an afternoon, and it catches most of what's actually broken on most pages. What it doesn't catch is the part that needs a second pair of eyes, and I'd rather name it than imply it: **Whether your capsule wins.** Legible at 120 pixels is a floor, not a result. The real question is how it holds up next to the twenty other capsules that appear beside it in your genre, on the day it appears. That's a comparison, and a comparison needs someone to actually pull the neighbours. **Whether your tags are competitive or merely accurate.** Every tag on your page can be correct and the set can still be a bad bet, because accuracy says nothing about how crowded the shelf is. Working that out means looking at what already ranks under each tag and how much of it is established. **Whether your screenshots sell your hook.** A screenshot can obey every rule and still show the wrong five seconds of your game. Finding the right five seconds means someone has to work out what your game is actually good at, which is not something a list can ask. Those three take me two to three hours per game. I've just described the method, so I'm not holding it back. What's left to sell is the hours, and having done it often enough to know what a crowded shelf looks like. If you have the hours, do it yourself. ## Where to start on your own Steam page checklist If you do nothing else from this post: shrink your small capsule to 120 pixels, fill all twenty tag slots, and check your first three screenshots against the question "would a stranger know what they'd be doing?" Those three account for most of what I find on an indie game page. If you'd rather have someone else work through the whole store page checklist and hand you the judgement calls, [get in touch](https://seeindie.com/contact/) and tell me which game. I'll tell you honestly whether it's worth doing.