Your store presence on Steam has a couple of text areas where you get need to describe your product in your own words. These sections should be focused on describing the overall theme, style, story, and features of your game.
Your Store Page descriptions can be found in each app of Steamworks under Store Presence > Edit Store Page > Description
Your Product's Short Description
Your product's short description is meant to be a brief synopsis, used in locations on Steam where real estate is limited, most notably at the very top of your game's store page.
Short Description Best Practices
- Focus on Your Product's Unique Value Proposition - There are a million things to say about any game, but the short description will need to quickly convey why a customer would want to learn more about this game in particular. What sets it apart from other games? It's often a good idea to mention the game genre.
- Save the Details for Later - The short description is generally not the best place to describe your game's full feature list or its narrative story arc. Those details can be shared below in the 'About this Game' section.
- No Formatting - This section only allows plain text. Extra line-breaks, bullet points, or other stylistic choices will not render properly in the short description.
- No time based text - Don't add "time-related" text to the short description as these will soon become old and out of date. Don't add" Now Available" or "Available on March 4th" or “Prepurchase now”.
Get to the Point! - The short description 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. You'll need to quickly encapsulate what your game is about but also pique enough interest to encourage further investigation.
The 'About This Game' Section
This is a longer-form section where you can describe your game in greater detail. It's lower on the Store page than the Short Description so it is useful to consider what information the player needs now that they have likely looked at your screenshots and gameplay trailer.
Good news: these players are interested and want to know more about your game!
This section has more formatting options and can include both written copy and imbedded images, such as screenshots or looping GIFs, which can be used to highlight key features or even short clips of your gameplay. If your game has multiple editions, this is also a great place to describe what's included with the different purchase options. Please ensure that any images are smaller than 5MB and remember that any text included in images will also need to be translated and re-uploaded when you localize your store page. For this reason, its best to keep it simple and use textless images.
Description Best Practices
Craft this section to best fit your product's particular marketing strategy and target audience. With those in mind, here are some best practices:
- Less Can Be More: You have more space here, but don't forget: the more you write, the less likely a customer will read all of it. Avoid long paragraphs or 'walls of text.'
- Make it Skimmable: Consider bolding your key features or section headers using the provided formatting tools. Most customers will only skim this section anyway, so bolding the main ideas will help them stand out.
- Keep the Newbie Audience in Mind: Many people will encounter your game for the first time through its store page. They may be unfamiliar with your game or perhaps even your game's genre. Help onboard them by minimizing "insider" jargon or acronyms.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: You can embed GIFs and screenshots in your 'About This Game' section to neatly illustrate your product's key features. For example, if your game is about managing a flower shop, the headline 'Build Beautiful Bouquets' won't need any further elaboration if its next to a screenshot of all the ornate flower arrangements players can make in the game.
With that in mind, you'll want to keep the total file size of all screenshots and GIFs below 15MB to ensure the page loads quickly.
Rules for Store Page Descriptions
Your Store Page descriptions should stay focused on your product and why a potential customer should consider it as their next game purchase. To help maintain this focus, and to minimize clutter across the Store, we maintain the following set of rules for Store Page descriptions:
- No links - You cannot use your store page descriptions or graphical assets to promote or link to other websites. This includes via embedded images, QR codes and even implied URLs via text such as "DOTA2 DOT COM". Instead, you should use the specific link fields provided if you want to link to common social media platforms or your own website. You can find these in the Store Page Editor under the Basic Info tab.
- No graphical assets that mimic the Steam user interface - You cannot host images or animations that are meant to look like Steam UI. For example, no fake 'wishlist' or 'buy now' buttons, no mock ups of other game capsules, no faux pricing informational overlays, etc.
- No advertising other games via your Store Page descriptions - You Store Page descriptions should focus on the product at hand. You cannot use them to advertise other products on Steam. This includes text, images, links, or widgets that point to or reference other products on Steam. If you have related products, it's fine to cross promote them as described in Steam's Cross Promotion documentation; it just can't be done as part of your Store Page description.
