Your capsule wins the click. Everything after that is where the wishlist happens. We covered the 0.3-second capsule battle in the Steam capsule design data study - this is the sequel, starting the moment a player lands on your page.
A store page visit is a 30-90 second audition. The player scrubs your trailer, flicks through 3 screenshots, skims your short description, and decides. Most indie pages lose that audition through wrong ordering, a wasted first 5 seconds, and a wall of text nobody reads.
Here is what converts in 2026, verified against current Steamworks documentation.
The 2026 Page Is Wider Than the One You Studied
Steam store pages got physically bigger. Valve announced wider pages in beta on August 14, 2025 and rolled them out to everyone in November 2025, expanding content width from 940 to 1200 pixels.
The same update added something quietly huge: you can now upload actual video files (mp4 and webm) inside the written description, not just animated GIFs. If your page still leans on crunchy 8 MB GIFs from 2023, you are shipping worse quality at bigger file sizes than the platform supports natively. Everything below assumes the 2026 layout.
The Trailer: You Have Less Than 10 Seconds
Valve's trailer documentation is unusually blunt: most Steam users want gameplay, and your first trailer should be primarily gameplay, from the perspective the player will actually experience. Valve also warns that a Discovery Queue customer may give you less than 10 seconds, possibly muted.
That gives you a hard structure:
Seconds 0-5: gameplay, cold open
No studio logo. No engine logo. No slow fade from black. Trailer editors like Derek Lieu have preached this for years: the first 5 seconds must show the game being played. A logo card spends your only guaranteed attention window on a brand nobody knows yet.
Seconds 5-30: the loop, escalating
Show the core loop 2-3 times with rising intensity. The viewer should be able to describe your game to a friend by second 30.
Length: 60-90 seconds
Valve does not mandate a length, but the working norm among trailer professionals is 60-90 seconds, and almost nobody argues for going past 2 minutes on a first trailer. Nothing essential after the 60-second mark.
2 rules people still miss
- Only your first 2 trailers appear before the screenshots since Valve's May 2023 update. Gameplay trailer goes first, always.
- Steam auto-generates a 6-second microtrailer from your first video by sampling 6 one-second clips, and you cannot customize it. Open with logos and black frames, and your microtrailer inherits that garbage.
Design for silence, too. Valve notes customers may watch without audio. If the hook only exists in the voiceover, it does not exist.
Screenshots: 5 Minimum, Gameplay Only, Front-Loaded
The rules first, because they are actual rules: Steamworks requires at least 5 screenshots, gameplay only - no concept art, no pre-rendered cinematic stills, no award laurels, no marketing copy pasted onto images. Valve's review process checks.
Within the rules, conversion comes from ordering and clarity:
- Your first screenshot is your second capsule. It gets far more views than screenshot number 7. Lead with the single most "this is the game" frame you own.
- One idea per screenshot. Combat, build mode, map, boss, progression. 5 different reasons to wishlist, not 5 angles of the same forest.
- Thumbnail test everything. Screenshots render small in carousels and on mobile. If the interesting thing is not visible at a glance, replace the shot.
- UI on or off? Valve recommends the player's real perspective, HUD included, at least in some shots. A page with zero UI reads as a tech demo hiding something.
The Short Description: 300 Characters That Do the Selling
The short description sits under your capsule art and follows your game around Steam wherever space is tight. The field caps out around 300 characters - Valve's docs just call it "a few hundred" and tell you to get to the point, because players skim it.
A structure that works:
- Genre + fantasy. "A turn-based tactics roguelike where every soldier you lose stays dead and haunts your next run."
- The differentiator. The 1 mechanic a competitor page could not paste onto their game.
- Scope signal (optional). "60+ weapons, 4 biomes, full controller support."
Do not spend characters on your studio name, your inspirations shelf ("a love letter to..."), or adjectives like "unique" and "immersive". At 300 characters, every vague word evicts a concrete one.
The Long Description: Skimmable, With Motion
Valve's guidance for the "About This Game" section is refreshingly honest: customers skim, so make it skimmable, and bold your key features so a skimmer catches the main ideas.
The structure that converts:
- Open with 1-2 punchy lines, not lore. Nobody scrolled down for the kingdom's backstory.
- A short feature list with bolded leads. 4-6 bullets, feature in bold, 1 concrete sentence each.
- Motion between sections. A 3-second loop of the grappling hook says more than 3 paragraphs. In 2026, prefer mp4 or webm clips (supported since the late-2025 update) for better quality at lower weight; GIFs still work.
- Respect the weight budget. Keep each asset in the low-megabyte range and the total description weight modest - Valve's docs push for lean assets, and the exact caps have moved over the years. A page that stutters on load converts like a broken page, because to the visitor it is one.
- Keep images textless. Valve recommends this explicitly: text baked into an image must be re-made for every localized page.
Tags: Your Top 5 Are a Positioning Statement
Tags are routing, not decoration. Per Steamworks documentation, the top 20 tags determine which tag pages and similar-browse views you can appear on, and they feed "More Like This" through tag overlap. At least 5 are required before launch; Valve recommends all 20.
2 practical consequences:
- Your top 5 tags should paint a clear picture of the game - that phrasing is straight from Valve. "Roguelike Deckbuilder, Turn-Based Tactics, Dark Fantasy, Singleplayer, Difficult" tells the algorithm and the player the same story.
- Specific beats generic. Valve notes that broad tags like "Action" or "Indie" carry little matching signal because half the store shares them. "Party-Based RPG" connects you to a real neighborhood; "Adventure" connects you to static.
Audit your tags against the 3 games whose audience you want. If the overlap is 2 tags, the algorithm agrees with your marketing problem.
Localization: The Cheapest Conversion Lever Left
The stat that should reorder your to-do list: in Valve's 2024 language data, Simplified Chinese passed English as the most common primary language on Steam - roughly 33.7% versus 33.5%. Percentages bounce month to month, but the direction is settled: most of Steam does not browse in English.
You do not need to localize your game to benefit. Valve's own recommendation: translate the store page first, then use regional wishlist data to decide which full-game localizations are worth funding. A store page is a few thousand words; lunch money next to localizing the game.
Priority order, per the folks who study this (Chris Zukowski of How To Market A Game, plus GameDiscoverCo's localization analyses): Simplified Chinese, then Japanese and Korean, then FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish), with Brazilian Portuguese and Russian strong in some genres. Your own demo funnel data beats any generic ranking.
Common Conversion Killers (the Quick Audit)
- Logo-first trailer. Your microtrailer becomes 6 seconds of nothing.
- Cinematic trailer in slot 1, gameplay in slot 3. Slot 3 is below the screenshots now.
- Screenshot 1 is a menu, a title screen, or fog. The second capsule, wasted.
- Short description that starts with "In a world..." 300 characters of lore, zero of game.
- A 10-paragraph description with no bolding and no motion. Skimmers see a gray wall and leave.
- 7 tags, 5 of them generic. You get routed to the "games in general" aisle.
- English-only page in a genre that sells in East Asia. Invisible to the store's largest language group.
- 20 MB of GIFs. The page loads like dial-up; the weight limits exist for a reason.
Know What a Fixed Page Is Worth
Before you touch anything, put a number on the goal: run the free wishlist calculator to see how many wishlists your launch target actually requires, then treat page conversion as the lever that closes the gap.
And measure the after, not just the before. Gamosy's free Steam analytics keep your wishlist history in one timeline, so when you swap the trailer or rewrite the short description, you can see whether the curve bent instead of guessing. The core toolset costs nothing; the pricing page covers the paid extras.
Change 1 thing at a time. A page where everything changed in the same week teaches you nothing about which change worked.
TL;DR
The capsule wins the click; the page wins the wishlist. Open the trailer with gameplay in the first 5 seconds - Valve gives you under 10, and the microtrailer samples your first video. Keep it 60-90 seconds, design for mute, only 2 videos show above the screenshots. Lead screenshots with your strongest frame, 1 idea each. Spend all 300 short-description characters on genre, fantasy, and differentiator. Bold the features, loop the GIFs, keep the page light. 5 precise tags on top, Simplified Chinese page first, and measure every change against your wishlist curve. GG - your page has an audition tomorrow.
More reading: Steam capsule design data study | Steam wishlist strategy | Steam Next Fest survival guide
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should a Steam trailer be?
Aim for 60-90 seconds, with gameplay in the first 5. Valve warns that Discovery Queue customers may give you less than 10 seconds, possibly muted, and the 6-second microtrailer is built from your first video - so front-load gameplay and skip the logo cards.
What is the Steam short description character limit?
The field caps out around 300 characters; Valve's docs describe it as "a few hundred" and advise getting to the point. Spend it on genre, player fantasy, and your differentiator. Translations exceeding the limit get truncated.
Does Steam support animated GIFs in the store description?
Yes, and since Valve's late-2025 update you can also upload mp4 and webm video files directly into the written description, which usually looks better at lower weight. Keep assets lean - low single-digit megabytes each - and images textless.
Which languages should I localize my Steam page into first?
Simplified Chinese first - Valve's 2024 data showed it passing English as the most common primary language on Steam - then Japanese and Korean, then FIGS. Valve recommends translating the store page before the game, then using regional wishlist data to pick full localizations.
