The first thing to unlearn is that there is one admin screen. There isn’t. Your store page is assembled from several separate areas of Steamworks, and the one actually called Edit Store Page holds less than you’d expect. Most of the time people lose in here is spent looking for a setting in the wrong place.

What Edit Store Page Actually Contains

Open your app’s landing page in Steamworks and go to Edit Store Page. Its tabs are:

Basic Info — accessibility support, controller support, social media links, anti-cheat declaration
Description — the visual editor for your written description
Special Settings — pinned bundles, related games, featured DLC
Early Access — a required checkbox and questionnaire if you’re launching in Early Access
Publish — where you push changes live and compare versions

Note what is not there. Pricing and release dates are not in Edit Store Page. They live under “Store packages, pricing, & release dates” on the application landing page. Tags aren’t there either — those go through the Tag Wizard, also on the landing page.

And the Publish tab matters more than it looks. Editing and saving does not update the public page; you publish from here, and you can diff against the live version first. If you’ve ever changed a description and wondered why the store still shows the old one, this is why.

The Capsule Sizes Changed — Old Ones Are Rejected

This is the single most expensive thing to get wrong, because most guides still have the old numbers.

In August 2024, Steam moved to larger capsule assets, and Valve’s own documentation states the old dimensions are no longer accepted. If you’re following a tutorial from 2023, you will build art that Steam refuses.

The current store asset sizes:

Asset	Size
Header capsule	920 × 430
Small capsule	462 × 174
Main capsule	1232 × 706
Vertical capsule	748 × 896
Page background	1438 × 810
Screenshots	1920 × 1080 minimum, 16:9

Library assets are a separate set, uploaded separately from your store assets — a common mix-up:

Asset	Size
Library capsule	600 × 900
Library header	920 × 430
Library hero	3840 × 1240
Library logo	1280 wide and/or 720 tall

Steam validates dimensions on upload, so a wrong-sized file fails rather than quietly looking bad — which is the good outcome. Grab the current templates from the graphical assets documentation rather than eyeballing sizes from a blog post, including this one.

Tags: Up to 20, and You Don’t Fully Control Them

Valve recommends adding up to 20 tags, and only the top 20 are visible to users and used to influence your game’s visibility in the store.

The part developers miss is that your tags are a starting position, not a final answer. You set initial priorities in the Tag Wizard, but customers tag your game too, and their tags mix in with yours. As more players apply a tag, its weight increases — so the ordering shifts over time, sometimes away from what you chose.

That has a practical consequence: revisit your tags after launch. If players consistently tag your game something you didn’t pick, that’s data about how your game actually reads to people. You can go back into the Tag Wizard and rebalance.

Adding “Indie” because you are one is wasted weight. So is any tag that doesn’t describe what the player does.

The Lead Time That Decides Your Launch Date

Here’s the piece that wrecks schedules, and it’s the reason to read Valve’s docs before planning a launch.

You do not control when your store page goes live. Valve does. The sequence:

Complete the “Your Store Presence” checklist on your app landing page
Click Mark As Ready For Review
Valve reviews it — submit at least 7 business days before you want the page live
Once approved, click Post as Coming Soon to make it public

On top of that, Valve requires a new product to have a Coming Soon page up for at least two weeks before releasing.

Stack those and the page has to be finished roughly three and a half weeks before your release date — and that’s assuming review approves it the first time. If you’re picking a launch date, count backwards from it, not forwards from today.

The Description Fields

Two fields, different jobs.

The short description sits at the top of your store page and appears wherever Steam has limited space — search results, capsules, recommendation widgets. Steam’s docs describe it as limited to a few hundred characters; the field caps at 300. Lead with what the game is: genre, the mechanic that makes it different. “An indie game by a small team” tells a shopper nothing they can act on.

For the About This Game section, Valve’s guidance is blunt about length: the more you write, the less likely a customer reads any of it. Their specific recommendations are to avoid walls of text, bold your key features and headers so the section is skimmable, cut insider jargon and acronyms, and embed screenshots and GIFs to show features rather than describe them — keeping total embedded media under 15MB.

The through-line is that nobody reads your store page. They scan it. Write for scanning.

A worked example

Here is the same idea run through this site’s copy generator. The game below is made up, but the copy is the real, unedited output — not something written for this article.

Gloomforge — dark fantasy, deckbuilder, roguelite

Forge a deck of cursed relics to delve into procedurally generated dungeons. Each relic has a sacrifice cost—use your own HP to power them. Balance risk and reward to defeat the Deep Lords.

Tagline

Your blood is the fuel. The Deep Lords await.

Steam short description (162 / 300 characters)

Forge a deck of cursed relics and delve into procedurally generated dungeons. Power your cards with your own HP. Balance risk and reward to defeat the Deep Lords.

Suggested tags

Deckbuilder · Roguelike Deckbuilder · Roguelite · Dark Fantasy · Dungeon Crawler · Procedural Generation · Card Battler · Difficult · Singleplayer · Strategy

You can run your own game through it in about thirty seconds: Steam store copy generator. It is free and needs no account.

Steam Store Page Admin: Your Game's Backend Explained