When should you make your Steam page?

Publish the page as soon as your required store assets are genuinely finished, and count backwards from your release date to find the last day that's still possible.

Those are two different questions and most advice only answers the first. On the early side, Valve says there's "no strong downside to having a store page up for a long time ahead of release", so waiting costs you nothing on Steam's side and gains you nothing either. Whether you're ready is a question about your assets.

The late side is where people get caught. Behind your release date sits a chain of Valve's own deadlines, and the last link in it is two weeks long: your Coming Soon page, the public store listing that exists before the game does, has to be live for at least that before you can press release. Miss it and your release date moves, not your page.

So this isn't a taste question. It's a scheduling question with hard edges, and if you're a solo dev or a small team putting up a first Steam page, you can work the whole thing out on a calendar: the deadlines that sit behind your release date, what has to be finished before the page can go public, what you can't undo once it is, and what the page does and doesn't do for your visibility. Every date below is quoted from Steamworks' own documentation, which I read for this rather than repeat what gets passed around in Discord servers.

If your assets aren't ready yet, the page isn't what's blocking you. Go finish the capsule.

Work backwards from the release date

Some of these run at the same time and some don't, so the useful way to read the table is as a set of earliest-possible dates rather than a sum. Valve's wording:

One wrinkle worth knowing, because it's Valve's documentation disagreeing with itself: the Release Process page says to submit "at least 7 days before you want it live", while the Review Process and Coming Soon pages both say "at least 7 business days". Two pages against one. I count business days and sleep better.

There's an ordering rule on top of the durations: "you'll need to submit your store presence for review before you can submit your build for review." That one isn't universal. The Review Process page treats the two reviews as separate tracks and reverses the order for adult content, but for a normal indie release, page first is the safe assumption. And note where the review ends: being approved isn't the same as being live. Once your page is approved, you still have to click the "Post as Coming Soon" button yourself, and the two-week clock starts then, not when Valve signs off.

Don't add the numbers up into one total. Valve doesn't publish a combined timeline, and as far as I can tell nothing stops the review from running while the fee clock is still counting. What you're looking for is the latest of the earliest-possible dates, and for a new account that's usually the 30-day one. Then leave slack on top, because a review can come back asking for changes and the clock doesn't care.

The 30-day clock nobody mentions

The fee itself is the part everyone knows: "$100.00 fee for each product you wish to distribute on Steam". Per product, not per account. It's "not refundable, but will be recoupable in the payment made after your product has at least $1,000.00 Adjusted Gross Revenue" — note that it comes back in a later payment, not as a refund when you cross the line.

The part that catches people is the 30-day waiting period attached to it. Paying the fee doesn't start a checkout, it starts a clock. If you pay it the same month you want to ship, you can't ship.

And be careful which 30 days you're reading about: there's a completely different 30-day rule for discounts after a price increase. Same number, unrelated clock.

What your Steam Coming Soon page needs before it can go public

The page can't go up half-finished. Valve reviews it before it goes public, so the gate is simple: six capsules, at least five screenshots, and a trailer, all finished and none of them placeholder.

Two details that catch people out. The screenshot floor is explicit: "You must provide at least 5 screenshots of your product." And the trailer isn't optional: "As part of the release process on Steam, you will be required to upload a trailer for your product."

The six capsules are the part where checklists go wrong. Most lists name four of them (Header, Small, Main and Vertical) because those four sit together on one documentation page. The Library Capsule (600×900) and the Library Header live on the page above it, and they're required too. Going in with four means a rejected review and a week you didn't plan for.

Sizes, framing and what actually belongs in each one: that's the store page post, and for the art itself, how a capsule gets judged.

What you can't take back

Two things make publishing a one-way door, and they're the real argument against rushing it.

Your assets become public property the moment you publish. Valve is unusually blunt about this: "Publishing a store page will move ALL store page data and assets (including screenshots, trailers and library assets) to Steam's public servers. There, they can potentially be scrapped or datamined by 3rd party websites and shared on social media. This is true even if your app is in an unreleased or hidden state." A placeholder capsule you meant to replace next month can be sitting on an aggregator site by then.

Your game's name locks. "Your game's name cannot be changed once a game has been through pre-release review process." If the name is still a maybe, the page is premature. Settling a name properly is its own piece of work, and it belongs before the review, not after it.

This is the honest counterweight to "as early as possible". A visitor arrives once. If they land on a page scraping by with the bare minimum, five screenshots and a placeholder capsule and a trailer cut in an afternoon, you didn't bank a wishlist. You spent one.

What publishing the page does not do

Putting the page up doesn't switch on a discovery machine, whatever you've read.

Valve says it plainly: "With a few exceptions like the Popular Upcoming tab, wishlists are not a factor in your game's algorithmic visibility on Steam." And Popular Upcoming isn't about how long your page has existed — "Visibility on lists and pages such as Popular Upcoming depend on release date."

The visibility rounds you may have read about are tied to launch and to what comes after it: there's the launch round, and then Update Visibility Rounds, where "You must wait until after your initial launch visibility has concluded before you can start using Update Visibility Rounds" (and in Early Access, another two weeks after launch). Nothing in the documentation ties a round to publishing your page. Valve never names page publication as a trigger, and never rules it out either, so I won't claim it in either direction.

What your Steam Coming Soon page does give you, from day one, is two things Valve names directly. People can wishlist: "Once your store page is visible to customers, interested people can start adding your title to their wishlist." And the Community Hub switches on with it, which "gives you a place to post announcements, share artwork, and gives your audience a place to share their enthusiasm and discuss your upcoming release." Both are real, and both start the day the page goes public rather than the day you launch. Neither is algorithmic help.

Your release date is a decision, and Popular Upcoming runs on it

You pick how precise to be: an exact date, a month, a quarter, a year, or no date at all. Two things to know before you pick.

Sorting uses the last possible day of whatever you chose. Pick "March 2027" and Steam treats you as though you'd picked the 31st, which matters for where you show up in upcoming lists.

And the date stops being editable: "You can change the release date of your game up to two weeks prior to your specified date." Inside that window, "your game will start showing up more in 'upcoming releases' lists" and "Once this visibility starts, you can no longer adjust your release date." Valve sends a reminder before the cutoff. Take it seriously. A vague date you can still move beats a specific date you're about to be locked into.

If you want a festival or a sale, the calendar decides for you

Two more edges that turn "when should I publish" into "when must I publish".

Seasonal sales require the game to have been released at least 30 days before the event starts. That's a rule about your release date, not your page, and it's the reason a launch two weeks before a big sale is a worse launch than one comfortably past the 30-day mark. I've written up which Steam events exist and what each one costs to join.

Next Fest needs your base game's store page published and public, and a playable demo live when the fest starts. It's only for unreleased games, your release can't fall before the edition ends, and each title gets exactly one Next Fest, ever. If Next Fest is part of your plan, your page deadline isn't two weeks before release, it's before the fest. The full Next Fest timeline is here, and if you're weighing a demo against a playtest, that choice belongs in the same conversation.

The number I can't give you

The question behind the question is usually "how long do I need to collect enough wishlists?" I don't have a defensible number for you, and I'd rather say so than invent one.

What I can tell you is how wide the spread is. The ratio of wishlists at launch to first-week sales varies, in the words of the person who collected the survey data, "by 10-20x, not 10-20%". Any single number is somebody's game, not yours.

And wishlists don't appear to go stale. The one cohort analysis I've seen that published its method (three games, so treat it as a signal rather than a law) found "no evidence that wishlists 'get old.'" That's the real argument for publishing early once your assets are ready: not that early wishlists are worth more, but that they don't seem to decay while you finish the game.

Valve's own position on predicting sales from wishlists: "Because everyone wishlists for different reasons, there's no formula to accurately predict sales from wishlists." Anyone quoting you a single conversion percentage is quoting something they didn't measure.

So: how do I actually decide?

This is the order I work through it.

1. Is the name final? No → don't publish. The review locks it.
2. Are all six capsules, five screenshots and the trailer finished, not placeholder? No → finish those first. The page isn't the bottleneck.
3. Have I paid the app fee, and when? Release is impossible until 30 days after payment.
4. Have I submitted tax information? That check runs 2–7 business days, and nothing downstream starts without it.
5. What's my release date, honestly? Don't sum the clocks — take the latest of them: two weeks of public Coming Soon page; a review submitted 7 business days ahead and running 3–5 business days; 30 days after the fee. Then add slack, because a review can come back asking for changes.
6. Is there a festival or sale I want? Then that date, not my release date, is the one to count back from.
7. Everything green? Publish. Valve's own note on the question: there's "no strong downside to having a store page up for a long time ahead of release".

The failure I see most often isn't publishing too early or too late. It's not knowing there was a schedule at all, and discovering the two-week rule in the week you wanted to ship.

If you want to go through an existing page rather than a new one, here's the checklist I work from. And if you're earlier than all of this, start at how to publish a game on Steam.