Your Steam store page: the page that makes your wishlists
Your Steam store page doesn't rank — it converts. What every section is for, in Valve's own order, and the two fields that actually feed Steam discovery.
Your Steam store page has one job: turn the person looking at it into a wishlist or a sale.
It's the dedicated landing page for your game on Steam — the title, trailer, screenshots, short description, tags, system requirements and reviews, all in one place. And it is not a page that ranks. Valve says so in plain words: store-page traffic and conversion rate are not factors in your visibility on Steam. So the goal isn't to game an algorithm with your store page. It's to convert the visitor who's already standing in front of it.
That reframe matters, because a lot of indie advice treats the store page like a webpage you do SEO on. It isn't one. Two fields on it — your tags and your supported languages — feed the systems that decide who Steam shows your game to. The rest of the page is there to convince a human. Once you see it that way, every section has an obvious job, and most of the common mistakes stop being tempting.
This is the hub for everything Steam on See Indie. Here's the whole page, section by section, in the order Valve shows it.
- The store page converts, it doesn't rank. Valve's own docs say store-page traffic and conversion rate are not visibility factors.
- Two fields feed discovery: tags and supported languages. Everything else exists to turn a visitor into a wishlist or a sale.
- Steam uses only your top 20 tags, and weights rarer tags more heavily than common ones. It's the biggest lever on the page.
- The page reads top to bottom in a fixed order: capsule, trailer, short description, tags, About This Game, screenshots, reviews, More Like This.
- A wishlist is an email Valve sends for you — at launch, at Early Access exit, and at any discount of 20% or more.
What a Steam store page is actually for
Start with what Steam counts, because it's the opposite of what most people assume. Valve's Visibility on Steam documentation lists what moves your game's visibility and, unusually, what doesn't.
| Signal | Does it affect Steam visibility? |
|---|---|
| Players and purchases | Yes — the strongest signal |
| Supported languages | Yes — Steam favours games a player can read |
| Tags | Yes — they gate browse pages, search and recommendations |
| Store-page traffic | No |
| Conversion rate | No |
| Wishlists | Mostly no (one exception: Popular Upcoming) |
| Review score | Only if it drops below 40% (Mostly Negative) |
Read that column twice. The number of people landing on your page doesn't move you. The rate at which they convert doesn't move you. Even your wishlist count mostly doesn't. What moves you is people actually buying and playing, the languages you support — players enjoy games they can actually read — and your tags.
So the store page isn't where you rank. It's where you convert — and it carries exactly two things that feed discovery: the tags and the languages. Hold onto that as you read the rest, because it tells you which sections are marketing (most of them) and which are metadata plumbing (tags, languages).
Walk the page in the order Valve shows it
A visitor meets your page in a fixed sequence. Here's each piece and the one thing it's for, top to bottom.
The header capsule, and the tiny one doing the real work
The header capsule (920×430) is the image at the top of your page, and it's what shows up in "Recommended For You", Big Picture browse, and Daily Deals. Valve's guidance in the Store Graphical Assets doc is blunt: it should be graphically-centric, use your key art and a legible logo, and carry no text beyond the title — no quotes, no review scores, no marketing strings.
The one that quietly does more work is the small capsule (uploaded at 462×174, from which Steam generates 120×45 and 184×69 versions). This is the thumbnail in search results, top-sellers and new-release lists — the crowded rows where a browsing player first sees you. Valve's rule for it is specific: your logo should nearly fill it, and it has to stay legible at the smallest size. Your full-size art can be gorgeous and still turn to mud at thumbnail scale. That shrink-test is worth its own post, and it gets one in the capsule-art guide.
The trailer: gameplay first, muted, ten seconds
Your trailer sits at the very top of the page, and the Trailers doc has two facts worth building around. First, the first two valid trailers show before your screenshots — so the first one carries the most weight. Second, Valve found most Steam users are looking for gameplay, so it recommends your first trailer be primarily gameplay, from the perspective the player will actually play from.
The context detail is the useful one: in the Discovery Queue — Steam's personalized feed that suggests games from each player's own activity — Valve says you may have less than ten seconds to make an impression, and the player may be watching with no audio. Design the opening for muted, fast, and legible. There's a second reason the first few seconds matter: Steam auto-generates a 6-second microtrailer by stitching together six one-second clips from your first video, and uses it across category hubs and seasonal sales. You can't customise it. Your opening seconds do double duty.
The short description: one job, a few hundred characters
The short description sits at the top of the page under the title. Valve's Written Description doc says to lead with your unique value proposition and to mention the genre — the thing that tells a skimming player why this game, not the hundred others. It's plain text only (line breaks and bullets won't render), a few hundred characters, and Valve specifically warns against time-based text: no "Now Available", no "Available March 4th", no "Prepurchase now". Those go stale and you rarely remember to fix them.
Save the feature list and the story for lower down. The short description exists to earn the scroll, nothing more.
Tags: the only discovery lever on the page
This is the section that actually feeds Steam. Everything else on the page talks to humans — tags talk to the algorithm.
The Steam Tags doc lays out the mechanics. You need at least 5 tags to launch and Valve recommends up to 20; only your top 20 are visible and used. Your top 5 should paint a clear picture of the game, and because some store filters prioritise the first 15, order matters — you set the weighting in the Tag Wizard.
Here's the fact worth memorising, in Valve's own framing: rarer tags carry more weight than common ones. Tagging your game "Action" does almost nothing, because nearly everything is tagged Action. Tagging it "Party-Based RPG" does a lot, because far fewer games claim it — so it's a much stronger signal for matching you to the right players. Tags drive your browse-page appearances, tag search, recommendations, and the "More Like This" section on other games' pages. Precision beats breadth.
Players and Steam moderators can add tags to your game too — the community marks up games alongside you — and you can remove ones that don't fit. There's more to the tag system than fits here: the order effect, the mistakes that bury a game, and that's a post of its own in this cluster.
About This Game: skimmable, newbie-friendly, textless
The About This Game section is the long one, lower on the page, for the player who's already interested. Valve's best practices from the Written Description doc are refreshingly plain: less can be more (short paragraphs beat walls of text), make it skimmable (bold your key features and section headers, because most people skim), keep the newbie audience in mind (drop the insider jargon), and use visual aids — GIFs and screenshots next to feature headlines, so "Build beautiful bouquets" sits beside a shot of the bouquets.
Two hard limits: keep each image under 5MB, and keep your total screenshots and GIFs under 15MB so the page loads fast. And keep images textless where you can — any text baked into an image has to be re-made for every language you localise into.
Screenshots: five minimum, gameplay only, mark four "for all ages"
You need at least 5 screenshots, 1920×1080 minimum, 16:9. The Store Graphical Assets doc is strict about what counts: gameplay only. No concept art, no pre-rendered cinematic stills, no images with award badges or marketing copy pasted on — those have their own dedicated spots on the page. Show the game as it actually plays.
The easy-to-miss one: by default your screenshots are not marked "suitable for all ages", and Valve says you should mark at least four that are. If you don't, your game may not appear in some places — like the front-page hover preview — even when it otherwise qualifies. It's a checkbox, and skipping it quietly costs you placements.
System requirements
Further down sits a plain, functional section most people fill in once and forget: the system requirements, where you list the hardware a player needs to run the game. It's not a marketing surface and it won't affect your visibility, but it does one useful job — it lets a genuinely interested visitor confirm the game will run on their machine before they commit. Fill it in honestly; a wishlist from someone whose PC can't run the game isn't worth much.
Reviews and "More Like This"
Two things sit lower on the page. Reviews are a credibility element, not a ranking dial — and per the Visibility doc, review score is mostly not a visibility factor as long as you're Mixed or above (40%+). Only if you fall below 40%, into Mostly Negative, does Steam feature you less. So reviews convert visitors; they don't rank you, until they crater.
"More Like This" is built from your top 20 tags — overlap, not order. It's the section that lands your game on similar games' pages and theirs on yours. Which is one more reason the tag field, not the prose, is where the discovery work happens.
What it looks like done right: Balatro
Rules are easier to trust when you watch them work. Balatro — the 2024 poker roguelike — has one of the cleanest store pages on Steam, and it mirrors almost everything above.
- Short description. It opens with "The poker roguelike." Four words and you know the genre — then the hook. No "Now Available", no release date. The Written-Description rule, followed exactly.
- Tags. The first ones are Card Game, Roguelike, Roguelike Deckbuilder, Deckbuilding — specific, high-information tags that reach the exact players who want them. The generic ones (Indie, Casual, 2D, Singleplayer) sit near the bottom, where they belong.
- About This Game. A bold one-line summary, then short feature bullets interleaved with looping GIFs — skimmable and visual, not a wall of text.
- Languages. Twelve of them. The discovery lever most first-timers skip entirely — and Steam favours games a player can read.
- Reviews. Overwhelmingly Positive across 100,000+ ratings — the trust layer that converts the visitor everything else pulled in.
None of it is expensive. It's the same handful of decisions, made on purpose.
The rules that quietly disqualify a page
A few Valve rules aren't suggestions — break them and your page gets flagged in review. From the Written Description and Store Page docs:
- No links in your descriptions or assets — not even implied ones ("DOTA2 DOT COM") or QR codes. Use the dedicated social and website fields under Basic Info.
- No fake Steam UI — no mock wishlist or buy buttons, no faux capsules, no fake price overlays.
- No advertising other games in your description, via text, image, link or widget. Use the DLC, "More From", bundle and franchise features instead.
- Publishing makes everything public — all assets move to Steam's public servers and can be datamined, even if your app is still hidden. Don't publish an unannounced secret.
None of these are hard to avoid once you know them. The trap is finding out during review, when you're trying to hit a date.
Turning a visit into a wishlist
The whole page points at one action before launch: the wishlist. Here's why it's worth pointing at, from the Best Practices and Visibility docs.
A wishlist is really a promise Valve keeps for you. When someone wishlists your game, they get an email at launch, another when you leave Early Access, and another whenever you run a discount of 20% or more. That's a re-marketing channel you don't have to build, aimed at people who already raised their hand. There's a lighter action too: a visitor can follow you, which puts your announcements in their Steam activity feed without the full commitment of a wishlist. And once you've launched, a major update — new content or a big patch — lets you reach those wishlisters and owners again: Valve's Update Visibility Rounds give major updates dedicated front-page space shown to people who have your game on their wishlist or in their library.
Valve's explicit advice is to publish your Coming Soon page as early as possible to start collecting those wishlists — the page can, and should, exist long before the game does. External pushes help fill it: a burst of visitors from a festival like Steam Next Fest, a Reddit thread, or a creator video can send real traffic. But note what's doing the work — the event sends people, and the store page is what turns them into wishlists. That's the whole point of getting the page right.
One honest caveat, so you don't overclaim to yourself: wishlists mostly aren't a direct visibility factor. Their value is the launch email and the purchases they trigger — and purchases very much do drive visibility. So a wishlist isn't an algorithm point. It's a warm lead with a scheduled reminder. That's better anyway.
That's the store page: a conversion surface with two metadata fields wired into discovery. Get the tags precise, get the languages in, make the capsule legible at thumbnail size, and write every section for the human who's skimming. The page won't rank you. It'll do something more useful — it'll turn the people who find you into people who are waiting for you.
