What you're getting wrong on your Steam store page transcript

Whenever I do a live stream, I very often get the question of like, "Hey, Marnix, can you take a look at my Steam store page? Tell me what to do, what's good about it, and what's not about it." But, I understand not everybody is chronically unemployed and has 4 hours a day or whatever to watch my live streams because I realize there are a lot of Steam store page mistakes. I was going through the Steam Next Fest, and I have to say a lot of them also, honestly, do not clear like the bare minimum standards that I think you should have in terms of having a store page.

This is also a genius title, Bust a Nut Game What Raising Cox. I don't know if it's genius, but it's a very unique title, at least. So, in this video, I kind of want to like hyper-condense all of the things I talk about in the live streams. I'm going to be walking you through a bunch of games that I found on the Steam Next Fest. Maybe this is a game that you made. I'm sorry if that's the case, but I just want to walk you through what I think the five things are.

These are ordered, so like the things at the end of the video are maybe a little bit less important, but they are all still super important because Steam store page is, at the end of the day, the main storefront of your game. It is where a lot of people will interact with your game for the first time. And let's begin with the first thing, and that is capsules because that is the thing like a Steam capsule is basically just the thumbnail or like the promotional image.

So, for example, this like Backseat or Testora or Nerds Revenge, these are Steam capsules. I'm not saying any of these are good. Don't get me wrong. And I feel like a big problem There's two main issues. If you do capsules bad, and don't worry, there's a lot of things I have to say about capsules. The first one is you have a capsule that looks like this. I'm sorry if you're the developer. I'm going to be mean to a few developers, I think, but you you need to hear this.

This is not good enough uh for Steam. The Amazing Bird Miner. Very standard font. The very unclear kind of like what does this game actually mean? What does this capsule invoke? I think that's a big one. With like a good Steam capsule, you can look at it, and you can immediately understand what are the vibes of this game. What kind of game are we going to play? And you you're lacking that if you have a game with a Steam capsule like this, for example.

Um so, this is the first one where it is just too simple, too bare-bones. It's a problem that I often see with your guys's capsules. And then the other one um is just like AI slop. That there's no nicer ways to say this. Uh unfortunately, there are so many AI capsules as well. Like, for example, there's just like these two and it's like you're not doing This is not good. I don't know what level of AI psychosis you need to have to think to look at this and be like, "Oh yeah, this looks like something people would actually want to pay money for." I don't even care about the ethical part of AI.

I just care about the fact that this is dumb and you shouldn't make something that looks this bad. That's kind of my my whole stance on like anti-AI. It's like, "Neither of these are good." But I feel like the person who makes this at least has the self-confidence to be like, "Yeah, actually I know my capsule isn't really that good, but I didn't get around to making something better." And then the problem is like, "Okay, yeah, does that mean I need to spend a thousand bucks to get a professionally made capsule?" I also think, honestly, no.

I think spending over 500 But I think there's a big problem, honestly, with like big capsule is what I'm terming it, where the prices in the last 2 years, especially like the last half year, I would say, have exponentially inflated in terms of how much you need to pay for a Steam capsule, where you are generally regularly getting quotes of over a thousand bucks for your Steam capsule. And I understand people like Chris Zukowski are like, "Yeah, your Steam capsule is very important." And I get that.

Your Steam capsule is very important. But there are diminishing returns once you're spending a thousand plus dollars on a Steam capsule. When we got our first Steam capsules, we had to pay like a few hundred bucks. We found like good artists on places like ArtStation and Fiverr. Fiverr's also dead, don't worry about that. There's nothing good there anymore. But suddenly it went up to hundreds of dollars. It takes weeks often up until up to delivery.

And at the end of the day, you know, the kind of the reason MMO98's capsule looks the way it is, uh ignore this or respect to, but like this capsule is also just because we had a capsule artist that was going to cost 700 euros, 700 dollars, I don't know even, just bail out on us anyways, and it's like this game still sold with a capsule I made myself in a panic mode like 3 hours before the next fest started basically.

Like I made this Steam capsule in like 3 hours of just like doing some iterating, and it's completely made with in-game assets. And I think that is something I would like you to try do a little bit more, I would say. There's another game. This is of your game. I think this is a really capsule. What they focus on, and what you should focus on, is mainly getting a good logo, finding some nice typography, playing with some assets.

But this capsule, I think, is pretty fire. Even though it is extremely simple, I think spending a thousand bucks on a capsule would not be a worthwhile investment, for example, in this developer's case. Because I think that's also thing of like, you know, if a capsule is going to cost you a thousand bucks, >> [music] >> you need to start thinking, "Okay, this might actually be worth it for me to genuinely spend 10 hours of like my development time on trying to make my own capsule in like my engine itself compared to spending a thousand bucks on it." Here's another example that I have here, Mining and Dwarves.

Nice logo. They got a good logo, but like everything else is just like in-game assets. Once again, thrown together in Photoshop, I assume. Or I've even done it. I have like in-game scenes that is just like my screenshot scene for the Steam capsule for one of our games. And it's like you don't need to spend a high amount of money to still get a decent, good-looking capsule that sells like the vibes of the game, but you also need something that is better than this.

Because this capsule is going to be the first thing that often people see, either if they're going through like the discovery queue, this is something that your eye immediately falls upon, or you're going through like things like festivals where you're scrolling like this. Where yeah, sure, you can kind of see screenshots, but they're very small. It is the main capsule, or this the vertical capsule, that matters a lot.

So, then we're working kind of in the order of like how do our eyes scan Steam store pages? That brings you to this one. I think this is a Steam page that immediately fails the vibe check because they have no trailer. I think this is a sin that you should never commit. Launching your store page without a trailer. Yes, you can technically do it. No, I don't think it's good. Because you're missing something extremely important and that is movement.

Games are an interactive medium and if there is no movement of like, "Hey, how does this game look and feel?" You're immediately losing out on a lot of the kind of like magic of a game. How is the game feel? How is the movement? Is it a fast paced game? Is it more slow and atmospheric? You cannot tell that thing from just screenshots alone. And I think I want to take this as like a a little side tangent and a break because that was something I did say like right now of like, "Oh, you shouldn't launch your store page if you do not have a trailer yet." And for the most part, if you are a no-name game developer and this is your first game, technically, yes, that doesn't really matter.

Why am I saying you should wait with launching your Steam page until you have a trailer? Few reasons. One, and I didn't expect this, as you get more popular as a game developer, press will start like following you without you explicitly controlling like, "Hey, I sent emails to press." This is what happened with M198, for example. We launched the store page and the next day I woke up and we had like 300 wish list from Japan.

Because I didn't send out any emails, but some Japanese press guy found out about our game, I think because they wrote a previous article from a previous game of us, they kind of followed us. And if there was no trailer there, probably that would have been a lot of less wish list that we would have gotten because there was no real visual indicator of, "Hey, what is this game about?" It is a marketing beat to launch your game, to announce your game, you do the release trailer, you have the store page, you do all of those things.

I think that is like number one of like, "Hey, there is this side effect of people may find your game." And you want your game once you can wish list to be in a good enough state. And two, I think this is kind of a bigger problem, is that having a trailer also forces you to have enough of a game to actually be worth putting on Steam basically. Because that is I think the third thing and that's how we get to screenshots and how the game looks.

Look, it doesn't matter how good your Steam capsule is if this is your game and all your screenshots are kind of samey and I feel like this is even like just cropped but like you know, the overall colors are kind of all the same and the game let's be honest guys, this game does not really look good. It doesn't look appealing. You could be like oh, the game doesn't look good enough yet to have a trailer then the game doesn't look good enough yet to belong on Steam.

Because so far okay, maybe you got lured in with the Steam capsule because this looks like you okay an okay-ish capsule. Sure it's like AI manipulated I would bet my left testicle on that one but once you then see the actual game it's just disappointment and it's like this is an easy way to not get anyone further interested. Have your capsule somewhat match the gameplay and have a game that is actually worth putting out on Steam.

This game, I'm going to say it, this is becoming a Next Fest trend, doesn't belong on the Steam Next Fest in my opinion because the game is too raw for a commercial release. If you're putting a game on Steam, you're planning to sell that game most of the time in which case you need to have a certain level of quality expectations for yourself. Like not shipping a game that has default TextMesh Pro, that has the default Unity skybox, that has weird ass shadows and all of these other UI problems.

It's not ready. It's too raw and your players will see this and this Next Fest for this guy is doomed basically. Because who looks at this and is like oh, this looks like a fun game. Maybe I'm jaded. Maybe you think this is the best game ever. If so, I guess wish list it. But I think that you know, having a trailer and having good screenshots and not just good screenshots but a variety of screenshots is important. I'm going to just pull up like AM 198 here.

This may seem dumb but like some of the things that we did on purpose in our screenshots is you can't really see it, but like our windows backgrounds changes. Even though like the the window layout is fixed because of the way that our game operates, I still purposefully try to make sure that every screenshot looks visually different enough. That's why for example, this more like dark like prestige screenshot is the way that it's positioned here is to stand out from this screenshot.

And that's why we also have the Minesweeper to have clear visual differences. Even if you look from afar, the screenshots still kind of look somewhat different with the things like the different backgrounds and all of that. Think for example, this is a game that does it really well where you can see like there is a different color almost in every single screenshot. And whilst certain colors get recycled, like this one may kind of look similar to this one because they're like placed kind of differently, it feels like the game is bigger than it might actually be because they have a game that one looks good enough and two has enough visual variety to not have five of the exact same screenshots.

So that is another thing. If you cannot have enough variety for your game, that means that your game probably isn't cooked enough yet to put onto Steam. Okay, so so far we haven't scrolled down yet. And this is where you can look at things like for example, your short Steam page description and your long Steam page description. And there's a lot of value you can put into it, but honestly, if your game doesn't sell through like the visuals, most of the time it isn't going to sell nearly as much to the description.

Steam short descriptions, it's kind of a formula. Honestly, the best way I can describe this just look at like three of your similar games and just make like a hybrid mashup. Explain the genre, explain the viewpoint, and explain with a bunch of verbs what is the player actually going to be doing. It's an incremental game. You go from small scale to global market. Improve your server infrastructure. That's a verb. Address technical challenges.

That's a verb. Release new games. That's a verb. And then what's the end goal? It's a number one MMO game studio that you want to become. This is kind of a a very basic formula, but it's kind of it's safe and it's going to work. Don't overthink it. Don't like go too crazy. I think this is a pretty good short description, honestly, let alone the rest of the store page, because it tells everything it needs to. Don't go and explain the lore of your game.

I think that's an important one of like you have to battle the entity and then you give the entity like some name. That's another mistake I see. Don't do that. Then scrolling down, this one, perfect example. Okay, we have some text. I I think honestly like this text, exactly what you write, matters less even. I think what's more important in all of this text, one, don't write too much text, two, have GIFs. That's number one.

If you do have GIFs, make them bigger. Um so, if you don't know, I I also I call them GIFs. Uh this is actually an artifact of old Steam. You can just upload MP4 videos now, which is way better. Steam, this section is 800 pixels wide. So, if you make a video to put on your Steam store page, it needs to be 800 pixels wide. You can make it as tall or as narrow as you want, basically, and then it's automatically going to fill up everything.

I think this is a good example of, "Hey, you don't need a lot of text." Very simple text, but I don't know why this is black. Maybe you don't want this to be black. You show your game. You do like some little video editing stuff and this sells the game 100 times more, like this screenshot, than trying to explain it in text. I like the the concept of like in your game putting like a little feature list at the bottom of like, "Hey, what are the key points of this game?" Does this actually matter with conversions?

I wouldn't even go to say that it matters that much, but especially having some good GIFs that really show the game well is important. You can take this even a step further. For example, if you would say that like this is a F tier, but you do have GIFs, so it's technically E tier. Like F tier would be no GIFs or no videos. I would say that this is a solid B or already I think this is honestly an A tier already. If you want to take it even further, some games to take inspiration from this is one that we did is like you can use in your video editing software like something called masks and then drop shadow to kind of make it more stand out and I'll just a pure rectangular thing although this definitely does work already.

You can play around a little bit more with like for example the styling here and there's this other game this is a viewer game shout out Emmanuel. I think they did something really cool. And that is this is one giant long video. I think this is a really solid thing if you want your store page to kind of stand out. Does it take more effort? Yeah, but you're raising the bar for yourself as well. Does this mean matter like a lot conversion-wise?

I'm not sure but I just want to show you hey there's more cool stuff you can do with like things like these custom borders for example. If you want to kind of lift your store page up a little bit more. And then the last thing is the common mistake I see. No matter how good you make your Steam store page itself with the optimal capsules with the optimal screenshots with the optimal description. If your game and your store page isn't localized, you are immediately shooting yourself in the foot for a lot of your players audience like they will never know about your game.

If we look at for example these Steam hardware survey, we can see these are the general languages that Steam users are using. I don't know if that makes sense. So English if we can find it here is at almost 40%. Okay, so this store page is localized in English it has [music] this box checked. So if these boxes determine which languages will see your game. If your game is checked in like French, French people see the store page otherwise no.

So right now you're kept at 40% of all of Steam. Less than half of Steam will be able to even see your store page. This is why Chinese is so important. Another 21% 60% of Steam is never going to see the amazing part minor because they never localized. One of the like most low cost investment I think you can make for most of the games unless you're making a a visual novel, is to localize your game and your store page the moment it goes live to once again expand your reach.

You do not need to go as far as to like localize all of your screenshots. It's something that we've done. It's kind of a pain. You can do it. It's not even needed. Just having the description localized already, plus having that box checked so that the algorithm can actually show you to people who speak that language will do a lot in terms of being able to find more games. So, this was like the quick round up. I'm going to repeat it one more time.

Step number one, most important thing, getting a good-looking capsule, but that doesn't mean you need to spend a lot of money, um is I guess thing number one. You can make a lot of stuff just by playing around with it a bit with a bit and just looking also like, "Hey, what is the other What are other people in this genre doing?" A good place actually that I'm going to reference is steamcapsule.com, and they have this thing called a design guide, where you can see like, "Why is this a bad capsule and why is this a good capsule?" And it has like a bunch of stuff like, "This is a good title because it's very legible.

This is a bad title because it's very low contrast. This is going to be one of the best sites I think you can see of like, 'You don't really know what this this genre is.' Like, yeah, kind of like soccer, I guess." Too simple, way more clear, iconic. Read this thing. I'll link it down below if you want to read it, and you can already make a pretty good capsule, honestly, based on this. I am not an artist, I would say, but I've just gone through this a bunch.

I've looked at a lot of the examples of this design guide, and I've just made a bunch of capsules, and you will get better at this. So, capsule is number one. Number two is have a trailer and have a game that is interesting enough to have good screenshots. That's number three. Getting your description, and less text is better, more video or like more GIFs showing gameplay features is more important. And then lastly, just localize your game.

And if you have those five things, you're already way better set to get more wish lists for your game and do all of that. Now, if this is something that you're like, "Bro, I have no clue how I do this, how I handle all of this. Then I am going to pitch myself as well. If you're like, "Hey, this sounds cool, but it's too much for me." There's a link down below if you want to work together with me, you can do that as well.

And I can walk you through like all of these things. I can look at your Steam page. I can help you with making the trailer and going through the entire process of also being like, "Hey, this game, let's focus more on this section and let's focus more on this section." If you're new here, we're game developers and we're sharing the things that we learn making games as well. And we're on the journey to build a million-dollar game studio.

If that's something that you're interested in, then make sure to head down below and subscribe cuz we upload these videos two times a week. And I think, you know, there's a lot of for you to learn. So, that's all I really to say. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.