Everything you need to make a great Steam page transcript

If you want just a list, you can find that in the description down below if you want a checklist for what to do with your Steam store page and go with that. This video is going to be me going through that list and then for every item basically giving you a little bit of more information like examples of like what's good, what's bad, and all of that. Now, before I do that, I'll do like a 10-second intro. Your guys' Steam store pages often have a lot of mistakes or a lot of like things that I feel like, "Oh, this would have been such an easy W to not make that same mistake." So, I figured let's just compile a list of every single thing that I think you should check off basically before you make your stone store page go live just so you have the best possible option basically or like the best possible launch and Steam store page and you guys can stop asking me to keep reviewing your damn Steam store pages.

So, I have this uh whole checklist which is just a Notion page. I think you can also copy it for like your own Notion if you want. Maybe I'll add some other formats. I'm not sure. I'll link that down below like I said and we're just going to go through it. Uh there's categorized basically on capsule, short description, trailer, everything you need to know and uh yeah, I'll just begin with the capsule. First big thing, if you make a game, your Steam capsule should not utilize AI-generated art.

And you know, why is this? Because it just looks bad. I'm going to be honest. If you think that you can genuinely make something good with um AI art, I invite you, mister prompt engineer, to go and put it up, but I'm going to tell you no serious game developer is going to use AI. Um just because two reasons. One, it looks bad and two, even if it looks good, but it's still is clearly AI and you're going to get needlessly hated.

Like, you know, you could be like, "Oh, this is a good capsule, bro. How could you say it's AI?" It's like you can tell it's AI. It's it's not that deep. And it's like cool, okay, yeah, this is serviceable, I guess, but it's like don't do it. I'm also against big capsule and like Steam capsule artists have gotten stupid expensive, but I think there's a lot of things you can do. Like, for example, this was a capsule I made in like a day, less than a day, with just like assets we had lying around.

I think this has a lot more charm. And you're not going to get canceled for having an AI-generated capsule. Of course, if you can get art that looks like this, obviously. Uh but this is maybe not the most feasible for everybody. And then next one, if you don't have like good key art, I think the one thing that is extremely important is having a custom logo or a semi-custom logo. What does that mean? Don't use a standard font like Arial or Helvetica and just type your game name, but try and make it more stylized.

Like once again here, you can see this is more stylized or another game that we did where we have this showing off more. This is just looking at like, "Hey, what's a cute font?" That's maybe like This is just a single font that we found. We have like It's like free to use. Lots of fonts you can find on Google Fonts. And then of course, you can go crazier. If you do things like for example, an easy one here is like, "Oh, you take the O and you turn it into an eyeball." Or you take like a T and you turn into a hammer if you're like making a mining game or whatever.

Just like doing stylized stuff like this. It's like for example, oh this is like text mining and dwarves, but then there's like a little crack in here to kind of make the the logo stand out more. This is what I would call semi-custom as in you start with a font and you keep updating the font with like, you know, gradients and colors and all of that. And then you give it like that one little extra thing showing kind of some of the the gameplay to it.

Um I would is what I would say. A lot of these fonts you can just make yourself. For example, also the Unicycle Pizza Time logo. This is an extremely simple logo and it's like, "Okay." Once again, it's a a default font. We just have a stroke and a a regular text color, but then in Photoshop you can make it like a little bit of wavy and we just gave it some wave and it it also has a little bit of more appeal. I'm I'm going to be honest, this is a pretty shitty capsule, especially looking back now.

This game out in a different time of Steam. But this is what I mean with having a semi-custom logo. Don't have just a default font and don't do like any other styling. Uh I give it a bit more. Next step, have a good visual contrast between logo and main art. So, this is for example putting beige text on brown backgrounds where it gets kind of hard to really like try and read the name. So, one example I have here is okay, so this is I guess Void Marauders, but because it is brown on brown with even more brown, even if I zoom in, it's not really very clearly legible.

This is something where you maybe want to go for for like a very very light beige or even just a plain old white just to have it be more clear and have good contrast. Another thing you can do to have more contrast is not stroke. I'm generally not a fan of stroke, but adding drop shadow behind your logo text just to give it a little bit more pop compared to the actual background. Next up, does not break any of the rules mentioned here.

I was like, "Okay, this is kind of one of the rules." There's a lot more of these rules. There is a link in the checklist that goes to this website, steamcapsule.com, and there is a very good guide here if you want to learn more about like capsules of like, "Why is this a bad capsule?" For example, "Oh, it's because it uses very harsh colors. It has no like real clear direction of like what should you look at? There's like, "Oh, there's something here.

There's balls here. There's a big balls here." I'm not sure. Something here as well like very poor contrast. You can hardly read the the Daydream text. It has a very weird font, I would say. And then once again, what does this game mean? Whereas if you look at Oxygen Not Included, very good contrast, very stark white text on a dark background, very clear focal point characters and all of that. Another easy one. There there's more on this store page.

I think they have like a total of like 10 rules. Very good to like look at once again of like, "Oh, why is this logo bad? And what does this logo do?" That's well, very good comparison. Take a look at this. I think you don't need to pay money for Steam Capsules. I think you can do a lot just by going through this list basically. Next up, logo does not overlap the Steam Templates. So, this is a link to here. What you see basically is there's like this little corner.

We go and we look up a demo, let's for example digging demo. There's like this thing on Steam. You need to make sure that this badge, this is also shown for soundtracks and for uh DLC, this badge is always here. You need to make sure that your text, your logo for example, doesn't lie underneath this uh badge. For all of developers, maybe you're not planning a demo immediately and then you can see like, "Oh, their logo is higher up here." But then actually, okay, they move it downwards because otherwise they're going to run into issues for their demo and their game build or that game build, but like their Steam store page submission would be denied.

Here on this link, uh there's also a direct link in the Notion document, there Steam provides templates by themselves. Oh, the templates are here. Download templates uh for sizing and text placement on store page assets. This just goes to a Dropbox link and here Steam has all of the different assets basically in Photoshop files with these templates um or like not these templates, but like the like little banner things are in there for you as well.

So, you can very easily see, am I going to break any of the rules and guidelines with my uh assets? Most likely not, but this way you can very easily still check it if you want to make your own assets. Another one does not contain any other text other than the game's name. This is mainly also just for your approval. Steam will flag you down if you do have other text. Uh I wanted to show you one example. If you do something like this, by default Steam will deny this.

The only reason we can get away with having bonus text such as with Service Pack 2 is because this is not a real capsule, but this is an artwork override. So, that's for up to 1 month. If you do like a big update, you can add more text. It could also be like something that says like, "Hey, now with more languages." But otherwise, don't add other text. Sometimes you see developers and they put like the genre on their capsule as well.

It's not as common, but don't do that. Uh don't put any text that is not your game's logo. Whatever stands here, basically, this is your game's name. Anything that is not this shouldn't come on your actual capsule unless you're using an artwork override, but that's something that you shouldn't worry about for now. And then lastly, capsule has a border to stand out. This one, I'm very much a pro-team border meta member.

It's a very simple thing. So, what is a border? I mean, the name kind of says it. You notice it here if we look at just like the Steam calendar. You can see it with games like, for example, Starbound and Rock Bottom. And also, like we had open here, Digging. They have a little border around their Steam capsule. I think generally, they give more pop to Steam store pages. They're more like visually flared. And also, you can use it, for example, in the small capsules, especially Mining and Dwarfs.

Once again, if we look here, you can see there is a very clear, like, border. So, if we look at a a larger list, it stands out a lot more than, for example, Mining and Tunneling Simulator, which has a pretty bad capsule. Here once again, Mining Goblins Idle has a border, as well. I think it's a very easy quick win to just add, like, a very bright, visible border with about, like, it's about eight pixels thick or something, I would say.

And then you can, once again, do stuff like having a little gradient on it, or you can have it be a solid color. We do it also for M098, and I think it just makes it look nicer on the store page. So, that is everything we need to know for these Steam capsules. Next up, we get to the short description. So, what is a short description? It's this part, these 300 characters or less that you can write about your game. And I think there's a a few rules.

I'm not going to go too deep into this. First big one, it should clarify the genre in the first sentence. So, for example, an incremental game where dot dot dot, showcasing the genre. A desktop pet {slash} idler where different characters. Okay, once again, we explain the genre. This one, it's a French love, so it's a little bit less. Single player social deduction game. Like you keep explaining it. Active incremental hacking simulation.

Incremental adventure. Okay, these are all like all incremental. It's just what I have open. But in the first sentence, you explain this is the game that you're going to be playing. Because this is usually this is why I worry so much about like capsule, short description, and then like this part of assets. This will be the first things that players read. Now, there's probably people in the comments who are like, "Oh, but as a Steam user, I only look at trailers." Or "I only look at capsules." Your capsule, your trailer, and your short description should all be good because some people do indeed only care about the trailer, some only care about the capsule, some only care about the short description.

This is something that once again, you can make a good Steam short description in like half an hour or something. You just make a bunch of variants. First thing cuz it is kind of formulaic. XYZ is a roguelike deck builder, for example. Immediately put the genre of your game in the first sentence. Spam. That's like 60 characters already done for you. Next up, you need to explain the end goal. What is the actual like fantasy end goal that the player is going to be doing.

He's going to be saving the princess. That's the goal. The go to the depths of a meteor. Okay, that's the goal. Go from M from a small-scale studio to global market domination. Once again, there's an end goal in here. There should always be a clear end goal of like why are we playing this game? What's the goal of this game? And how does that tie into like the fantasy basically? That's usually like sentence number two.

And then sentence number three would be describe using verbs what the player does. Trading, fighting, dodging, manipulating, building. Anything basically. Generally, when I have at least three, four, maybe five, but especially at least three different verbs that encapsulate what is the core gameplay loop. What are you as the player going to be doing? Don't list features, list actions, list verbs of what you're going to be doing.

Improve your server infrastructure, address technical challenges, release new games, and become the number one MMO studio. Another one here, mine ores, unlock upgrades, find cosmic treasure. Those are once again three verbs that very clearly explain, okay, what are the main things that I will be doing? I'll be looking for treasure, I'll be mining, and I'll be upgrading. And that's kind of once again the gameplay loop explained of like, okay, I mine, I find treasure, I upgrade.

And I think once again this is like a pretty good capsule. And then the last one, this one if you're a beginning developer, I think I really need to slap you guys with this. Do not mention lore-heavy concepts. Sometimes, you know, you want to write a book, but you end up making a game. Is the best way to describe it. And you see like these these very convoluted and heavy short descriptions where it's like the prime cyrule has taken over Terra or something like that.

And you're immediately dumping a lot of lore into the player who has no clue what the your game is because this is the first time they see your Steam store page. Instead of [snorts] something like this like the prime cyrule has no meaning. It has meaning in your story, but for somebody who hasn't even looked at anything else of your game, that is a concept that doesn't make sense. Is it a person? Is it a team? What is it?

Is it a Is it an object? Whereas you could also just be like, hey, fight back against an alien invasion. Much clearer and simpler to understand and I know oh, you're going to be like, oh, I don't want to simplify my game that much. Tough luck. [snorts] If you don't simplify it and don't mention like the lore-heavy stuff, people will just be confused and not interested in your short description. Okay. So, that's the short description.

Let's hand it over to the next part, the trailer. So, the trailer is what you see here uh when you just play or like this auto plays most of the time. It's also used for the the like if you go to flick for example a a tag homepage, you have like trailer TV, which just immediately always shows a trailer. Having a trailer is very important. That brings me to number one. Have a trailer. If you do not have a trailer, I honestly believe you should not put your Steam store page live.

Yes, technically you can do it, but usually the reason that I hear people saying that, oh, why don't I have a trailer yet? It's because like, oh, my game isn't ready enough yet. And I think if your game is not ready enough yet for a trailer, it is not ready enough yet to market and have a Steam page altogether. Yes, Steam doesn't require it, but if you want to become part of the Bider Army and you want me to be proud of you, the only way I'm going to be proud of you is if you have a store page that also has a trailer.

If you have a store page without a trailer, I'm never going to be proud by you. I'm only going to be disappointed. I'm going to be honest with you there. So, step number one, have a trailer. Okay, step number two, trailer length of about 30 to 50 seconds. I think that's another big one, you know. There will be people who are yelling at me like, oh, but look at the the trailer for today. I think this is a horrible trailer um because it is just non-stop for 1 minute and 22 gameplay.

So, if you do this, once again, I'm going to be disappointed in you. Trailer has a a few rules. Trailer length of 30-50 seconds. I think anything longer and you're needlessly dragging out attention spans, basically. The first thing is a cold open. What's a cold open? This is a an article from Derek Lieu. Imagine your trailer has like tension, so to say. This is like the the higher the the line is on this graph, the more tension there is.

So, the cold open is like, you know, those those like 10-15 second teasers for like Marvel movies where it's like immediately Captain America is in your face. And then it's, I don't know, the Hulk and then Thanos is suddenly there. And there is so much like insane action packed into like the first 5 seconds. And then it calms down. Then you suddenly get like the funeral scene or whatever and it's like very slow again.

But that is what the cold open is about. Where you show the main highlights of the game in those first 15 seconds. I think Unicycle Pizza Time does this pretty well as in we're immediately showing what's the gameplay loop. We have very quick cuts and then now okay, now we start again from zero 8 seconds into it and we can take a little bit more time with the trailer. I don't know there's no audio playing right now so it might not be as obvious but that is generally a cold open.

The first 10 to 15 seconds you go quick quick quick showing a lot of the different game play actions the things that matter the most because retention graphs are pretty bad. I'm going to actually pull up once. This for example is the retention graph for one of our trailers and you can see okay on on second zero 96% people are watching but you can see by like second a third of all players or like all potential players have already stopped watching your trailer.

So if you wait too long with putting the juicy stuff and the juicy game play at the up front of your trailer a lot of people will just dip out basically. They will leave before you ever get to showing the good stuff. So show the good stuff show the core game play loop in those first 10 15 seconds not longer and then afterwards you can take a little bit more time and go a little bit slower. Next up does not have individual shots lasting over 6 seconds.

So yeah, generally in the cold open I would say go for like three four seconds per shot because otherwise also you're not going to hit the 15 second market most but in general you know, sometimes I see developers make this mistake where they do like a single shot of them walking or doing something for like 15 seconds non-stop without any cuts. I think that is just unfortunately not good. So as a a simple like limit for yourself don't go over 6 seconds per shot per thing that you're showing in your trailer.

If something takes 6 seconds or longer just cut shorten it and come back to it at a later point but interrupt it with some other part of your game basically. Also upload your trailers to YouTube as well. I don't know why this is a mistake that I see a lot of developers make even if you don't send your game trailer to someone like IGN for example nothing is stopping you from still just uploading your game trailer to your own YouTube channel.

It's it's an easy potential gain. That was what we did for example here with M198's trailer as well. We uploaded this. This is not on the channel that you're watching. This was on a a pretty unknown channel. It had 100 subscribers back then. And algorithmically it got picked up still by YouTube and we got 200,000 views. And you might be like, "Oh, I'm not going to get any views." And you know, I'm I'm going to be honest, that also happens.

We have trailers with 200 views. Uh and and very limited growth, but you see still here somehow there was like a spike here. And then there was another spike here. I don't know why the algorithm does that. And that's it's not really a lot of effort to just upload it to your own channel and at least it is out there a little bit more and you have one other like way to market your game basically. And then the final thing contains a 5 to 8 seconds ending call to action scene with wish list now or demo out now.

So this is for example, uh let me open our trailer here. This is a very simple thing. You kind of just Oh, this is the uh release call to action, but it's like, "Okay, you don't show active gameplay anymore. You show like some art, some key art, or whatever." The title in big and then instead of like out now, you could be like wish list now or something like that. And then yeah, we have like wish list on Steam here as well.

Uh let's pull up the announcement trailer's call to action actually very quickly again. So here you can see like, "Oh, okay. We have gameplay." And then we fade into the call to action. The game demo out now, wish list on Steam. This is actually kind of bad because we have two call to actions. Either you do demo out now or you do wish list on Steam, but not both. I'm not perfect either. Uh but that is what you should do in regards to the trailer.

Next up, we come to screenshots. First off, you should have a minimum of seven screenshots. Steam requires you to have five, but Steam rechanged their UI, I think uh about half a year ago at this point, where the the size of the screenshots in like this list here below has gotten smaller. So if you have only five, it looks kind of bad because 1 2 3 4 5, there's like an empty space here. And I think generally once again you want to have seven.

It's It's the same thing of like the trailer. If you feel like, "Oh, but I don't have enough content for seven." It might be just a sign that hey, the game is actually too raw and too early right now to be put put on to Steam because you're missing some other core stuff. So, that's number one. Okay, first screenshot showcases the main game mechanic. Okay, we have Demon Bluff here right now. Okay, this shows what's the main thing you're going to be doing.

There's like cards, there's text, and this should explain kind of already immediately what's the actual gameplay like. Uh we have that here as well. We have our dashboard for MO98. This is once again the first screenshot. Okay, I have a bunch of stats here. I have this like simulated RPG world. I can immediately tell the player what is like the fantasy of this. Whereas if I give them like let's say this or or this as a screenshot.

They're going to think if this is screenshot number one, oh, it's a Minesweeper simulator, which it's not. It's a a part of the game, but it's not what matters the most. Screenshots show the gameplay including game UI. This is something that I just want to give a and next to a little extra call to action or like an extra call out, show your UI in your game as well. It It infuriates me to the core if people disable their UI.

You see this mainly with like the very very beginner newbie developers who are like, "Oh, I want to be cinematic because that's what Battlefield does." You know, like if you look at the for example the Battlefield 6 screenshots, they're dog Like they tell me nothing as a developer or like as a player. It's It's like just like these like pre-rendered stuff. This is not what you should do. But a lot of developers are like, "Oh, but if Battlefield does it, then I can do it, too." Or like other AAA game that does this.

Uh don't do that. Show your actual game, show your gameplay, show your UI. Also, as a a little follow up, do not show UI elements. Like I have people who like they submit their main menu as like one of the five screenshots. They're like, "This is not important enough to put on your Steam store page. Don't put things like your main menu, your pause menu, or your settings menu. Again, if you need to put like artificially inflating your amount of screenshots, but things like main menu, it's probably a pretty big sign that hey, actually it's too early right now to think about the Steam store page because you are not ready.

You do not have enough engaging interesting gameplay to fill up seven screenshots. And then a final thing, have a variety in color and scene setup. So, don't have four screenshots that show the exact same thing, basically. I think once again, Demon Bluff does this pretty good where even though they have a limited color palette, mainly green and red, they still, if you just look zoomed out here, the small little thumbnails look somewhat different still.

They don't put like too much green or they only put like two greens in a row, then predominantly break, two more greens, then a red, then a green. Maybe not the best example, but here also very zoomed out, if you just look at the small things, it's like okay, we have a bunch of different colors each time. And this makes it more memorable. Your game doesn't feel the same, basically. Where this is another one, this is grass, but even though it's always grass and the same background, every single time the grass is a different color.

To also show that there is more depth in the entire game, uh basically, than it's built just five times the exact same one year environment, one level, one biome, cuz I see developers made that often of like we only have like the demo scene from some asset pack, and this is our game right now. Let's get the Steam page up as fast as possible. Don't do that. So, yeah, those are the screenshots. And honestly, you know, I think these are the biggest, most important things.

I have more stuff here. I put them under the smaller stuff category because, you know, these things matter less. Let's dive into the long description. What's the long description? It's here. It's the about this game section at the bottom. First things first, starts with [snorts] one or two sentences of text. Why? This text, if I were to like copy the link up here and then send it to a friend, it would not utilize this as like the embed basically, but it uses the first text that is written here like the first few sentences.

This will be used for the embed if you send like a Discord message or something else like that does embeds basically. This gets shown. So, kind of what I usually do is this is a little bit more lengthy sometimes, of the short Steam description. You can also just put the entire short description up here again, although I think it's a little bit redundant. We want to explain a little bit uh differently. But, first things you put in here should be text, not title.

That's why I say text first because if I immediately was like expand your game's infrastructure, then the embed would show like the game and then immediately expand your game's infrastructure. It's kind of like it's not explaining stuff very well. This might already be a bit of a a more niche tip, but something I think you to keep in mind. Next up, don't have too much text. I see a lot of developers and they make like these whole lore dumps once again, writing like the entire story and world and nobody cares about this in their long description.

If something has more than three sentences in a row, people's brains will turn off and they will not want to read it. And it's just unfortunate, but that is the way it is. So, generally, I try to like have it most of a thousand characters if you want to like give yourself a little bit of a benchmark. What I do is I generally do one header, one sentence, one GIF. Well, GIF GIF GIF, however you want to call it. It's actually an MP4 video converted to WebM for the technical specifics.

But, all of these just one sentence, a little bit of explanation, and that's it. Less is more. Let the pictures do the talking. An image says more than a thousand words or something like that is true, especially if that image is a video. That says even more. That says more than 10,000 words. So, just show the important parts of your game and don't write it. So, that brings us to the next one. Contains two to four GIFs showing the gameplay highlights.

These are 800 pixels wide and I say GIFs because this is what used to be required by Steam and no long no longer for I think the past year or something. It now uses MP4 files or like you can upload an MP4 file and Steam will convert it to a WebM, which is actually more efficient than GIFs and they also support like pausing now. So, you can make them 800 pixels wide because that is how wide the like Steam about this game section is.

If you make them less wide, they're going to be like offset basically. So, they're going to end earlier. Anything wider is possible as well, but they're just going to get cropped or like not cropped, but like resized to be 800 pixels wide. Lengthwise, there's no limits uh like heightwise not lengthwise, but like you can make them as tall or as short as you want. So, you can see these are not the same height. This is like true 16 by 9.

This is more of a cropped in view. Those are fine as well. And then the final thing that I like to do is that it has a features section showing things like for example, oh controller support, level count. I think an example for this is here at the bottom. So, like oh, it's it's kind of just like a a highlight summary of what does your game have. So, this is these are old Steam page uh capsules. So, here you can see these are 600 pixels wide and they did not get converted.

So, there's just like an ugly emptiness to the side. So, if you make new uh assets, use MP4 files. So, kind of just like oh, I support multiple languages, I support controller whatever. That's kind of what the the features thing is. Like here also, 100 unique character cards, cosmetics. The cards line, you know. I think this is always a good little thing to put in as like the final like recap basically of what's the entire game and keep it in there.

Okay, long description is done. Next step, we get socials. Links to your YouTube and Discord are I think the most important thing. So, what does that mean? Here in the the side you can see YouTube and Discord. You can also put like other things such as your XD everything app account, but mainly I think the important ones is a YouTube or a Discord. YouTube because that's where you're going to put all your trailers anyway, so there should be content for your game over on YouTube, and Discord so that people have a way to actually come and like take a look at what's going on, letting you know about bugs or other feedback things that they want you to do.

Next up, you can link to your website. Uh in this case we have a website. We actually don't have a website, but this links to our press kit. This is the alternative if you do not have a website, you can also just make a press kit. You have to make a press kit anyways, otherwise I'm going to be get mad at you. Uh I highly recommend press kitty. This is completely free for up to three press kits. It's very easy to make a press kit.

So for example, this is the press kit from My Virtual Friends. So if you click on like the visit the website, it goes here because this has more information, contact detail, high quality assets and screenshots if someone like the press wants to write about your game. This makes it possible to find assets for them to talk about your game. And then the last thing that I think you should do like socials wise is you need to follow your own community discussions board.

So this might be a weird one, but if you go here of like view discussions, I guess discussions is a better term. This is like the default, so normally it will look like this and there's going to be this button subscribe to forum. You click this, and now every time there's a new post, you get a little notification up here. And this way you know if somebody writes like a bug report or feedback or anything like that, you know that they've done this because I see so many developers like they get some posts on their Steam discussions.

You will get no information about this unless you're subscribed to the forum. And then like two months later they reply like, "Oh, I didn't even know people were responding to the Steam discussions. Let me look into the problem." Or whatever, but it's kind of like, you know, it's a missed opportunity. Once again, it's something that takes 10 seconds to do. Next up, this is an important one, localization. I think your store page always should be localized even if you just make the store page public, you can still change this for the full game, but especially when the game is not out yet, localize your store page and mark your game as localized as well so that you show up algorithmically in as many places as possible.

I think the bare minimum languages you should go for are English, German, Portuguese Brazilian, Spanish Latin America, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean. These are a bunch of languages, I know that, but just making sure that your store page is localized especially because we're not going to be writing giant books like just localizing like these little pieces of text is pretty easy. You don't need to localize your Steam store page assets, I would say even like your your screenshots don't need to be localized.

Just your short description and then your long description, you localize those and then you check the boxes in Steam to mark these languages because this is what matters. You can There's two points where you're localizing your game. I can actually just pull it up. So, point number one here is under the Steamworks and then description. And then here you can see like the store page I can be like, "Oh, this is the the French localization.

This is the English localization." You can see these ones. If you just localize only here, it doesn't really matter because to to Steam's eyes basically your game still counts as unlocalized. What you need to do is you need to go to basic info and then scroll down here to supported languages and then here the same languages that you localize the Steam store page to, once again, the languages I mentioned before, you check the box for interface here as well.

And then you hit save and you publish it and this way your game will show up for members of other languages. And then what you can do is you can just end up not localizing should turns out like, "Oh, I don't have budget for this." or it's kind of not feasible. Uh you can just uncheck these by the time that you're closer to release once you have a better idea, but this way you will get more wish list data also from these other countries because otherwise if you only localized your game to English, people from China will not get this game in their algorithm feeds, for example, which makes it a lot harder for them to wishlist the game as well.

So, you kind of don't get data of like, "Hey, should I even localize my game, uh yes or no?" So, yeah, this the the game itself is also marked as localized. So, this is I actually localized the text. And this is I checked the boxes here under supported languages. And I have a few other stuff, uh small stuff. Number one, make sure your game has 15 to 20 tags. So, tagging is done here, I tagged my title. Uh technically, you only need five, but I think you should have at least 20, um or like 15.

You can't go over 20, so in this case, relaxing and inventory management are not included because those are 22. And then as a a follow-up point, these tags are ordered as well, with the most important tags like by weight, indeed. Strategy is the most important tag. And then like, you know, a tag like MMORPG is kind of actually not that important, and it's all the way at the bottom because it's not a real MMORPG. Something like parody as well, single player.

These are tags that are relatively weak because there's just so many single player games. So, you can put them all the way at the bottom, and then the important tags like, for example, it's an idler, it's an incremental game, those go all the way to the top. 15 to 20 tags, look at games similar to yours, and go from there, basically. Visual viewpoint. It's not that hard, uh to be honest. Release date should be set to year or month, unless if the day if your game is planned on being released in less than 2 months from now, then you need to put the exact date.

So, what does that mean? Sometimes you see games here, uh this is a game that's already out. Let me find a game that's not out yet here. Okay, Demon Bluff, uh plan to release 8 2026. Often you see here like to be announced or coming soon. I think that's bad. I think you always want to give an idea of the year or the quarter or the month. The benefit of this is that people kind of feel like, "Oh, this game is actually going to come out." Because a coming soon game is kind kind like, "Is this abandoned?" I don't know.

Are developers actually planning? Whereas like oh this game is going to come out in 2026 so I assume that developers are still working on this. Also if a game like misses its release date and like the developer doesn't update it, it automatically goes back to to be announced or coming soon or something like that. So because of that, I always suggest you to have a year. Even if that is 2028 or whatever it is, I think it is still better to have a year or a quarter than to have just coming soon or to be announced.

Now, why do I say if you're less than two months out from release, you should add a release date? Because the exact release date is going to be used for your personal calendar. And your personal calendar is kind of what's going to drive a lot of wish list traffic as well. Where you can see now, okay, developers here on the 12th of August, Orbits is going to come out, which is a bite me viewer game as well. If they just had their release date set to August, they would not show up here in this calendar.

They would actually show up only on August 30th, like the last day of the month, August 31st, which is going to not really give them any algorithmic benefit. So you basically, if your game right now, it's the 30th of June as I'm recording this, so a little bit less than eight weeks, seven weeks I guess, kind of in advance, you should put the Steam store page public or like the the release date public. And then a little side thing I'm giving you just now, this is not on the checklist.

If you do announce your release date later on, then also make a release date announcement trailer, upload it to YouTube YouTube, because it is a little bit of an extra marketing beat just to announce like hey, the game is going to come out this exact day. Next up, this is a another small one, but it is the Steam developer home page should be configured. So what is the Steam developer home page? If we click here on developer Bite Me Games, you'll see we get brought to this like nicer page.

People can follow us and they can find like more of like oh these are the upcoming games, these are the the current discounts and all of that. And then you can see some more information. This is like a nice developer page. Whereas, if we look at, for example, I think Chillas' Art, if we just click on Chillas' Art here, you see they just give like this thing. And it's not really that good. You can't follow the developer, which is another big one.

Uh it's a lot harder. So, you can actually set it up pretty easy. Uh there's a Steam there's a link here to how you set it up. It takes like 15 minutes tops. And you do it one time, and then you just link the the game to the the the whole page, and then ta-da. Uh it's easier to follow, and especially if you start making more games, this is going to help with cross-promotion as well. It's an easy win, so why wouldn't you bother with it?

And then uh the last thing you can do, this is kind of outside of Steam, if you do make your Steam store page public, this is a pretty big marketing beat event. You want to do a press release as well. Uh you can send those out through GamesPress. And if you're wondering, "Hey, how do we do this?" cuz this looks uh intimidating, it's actually not that hard to send out a press release. I have made another video that does exactly that, which I think I can link right here.

So, that's all I have to say. Uh there's a link down below to get the entire spreadsheet again, and I wish you the best of luck with your Steam store pages. If you want to follow us along, we're on the journey to build a million-dollar game studio, and we want to get you guys to stop making slop as well. So, we have a bunch more cool videos coming out soon. And uh I think if you want to join us for that, head down below and subscribe as well.

That's all I have to say. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.