How to use GIFs in your Steam store description

Players skim About This Game. Valve's own advice is to avoid walls of text and bold the key features, and a bold header with a three-second loop beneath it, showing that feature working, tells a skimming player more than a paragraph can. That is why so many indie pages are built as header, sentence, GIF, repeated.

It is not the only way. On 18 October 2026, Hollow Knight's About This Game carried 13 images, a visual tour of a world built for exploration; Balatro's carried none, leaving its combos to the trailer and twelve screenshots. Use GIFs where motion explains something a still cannot: a movement mechanic, a combo, a transformation, a build that grows. Skip them where a screenshot says it all.

From Valve's Store Page Description documentation:

• Each image under 5 MB.
• All screenshots and GIFs together under 15 MB, so the page loads quickly.
• Textless images where possible. Any text inside an image must be translated and re-uploaded when you localize the page.
• No links in images either: no QR codes, no implied URLs.
• No imitations of Steam's interface: no fake wishlist or buy buttons, mock capsules or price overlays.
• No other Steam products promoted in text, images or widgets; related games belong in the More From section.

• One idea each: the feature named in the header above it, and nothing else competing for the eye.
• Real play: what the player will actually do, captured from the game, not a cinematic. Steam's rules for screenshots ask for gameplay, and players hold GIFs to the same standard.
• The payoff in the loop: start just before the interesting moment and end just after, so the loop reads as cause and effect.
• A clean loop: pick start and end frames that match, or cut on a hard action, so the restart is not jarring.
• Readable at a glance: a zoomed-in camera or a cropped region often reads better than the full screen shrunk to 600 pixels.

Size is driven by width, frame rate, length and colours. A practical target for the description column: about 600 pixels wide, 12 to 15 frames per second, two to five seconds, and a palette of 128 colours or fewer. Recorded footage converted with ffmpeg's two-pass palette method looks far better than a naive conversion at the same size:

In order of how little they cost in quality:

1. Shorten it. Three seconds that show the feature beat six that show it twice.
2. Crop it to the region that matters instead of scaling the whole screen.
3. Lower the frame rate to 12 fps; most gameplay still reads.
4. Reduce colours to 96 or 64; pixel art often survives with fewer.
5. Narrow it to 500 pixels.
6. Use lossy compression sparingly, and check the result at full size.

Keep a running total: five GIFs at 3 MB each is already the 15 MB budget before counting screenshots.

1. List three to five features a player cares about, in the order they meet them.
2. Write a bold header and one or two sentences for each, in plain words.
3. Record each feature in the game at full resolution, a few seconds either side.
4. Cut and convert each clip to a GIF under 5 MB, textless.
5. Upload in the About This Game editor and place each GIF under its header.
6. Preview the page on a laptop and a phone, and check the total weight stays under 15 MB.
7. Localize the text; the textless GIFs serve every language.

Every GIF loads with the page, on every visit, including on phones over mobile data, where many players first meet a store page through a link. A page that is slow to load loses visitors before the first GIF plays, which is the reason for Valve's 15 MB budget. Two habits help. Put the most important GIF first, high in the section, since visitors who scroll no further still see it. And keep loops calm: rapid flashing, full-screen strobes and fast camera shake are uncomfortable for some players and look like noise at thumbnail size. A GIF should feel like a window into the game, not an advert shouting over it.

GIFs are heavy, low-colour and silent, and they repeat endlessly. For a game whose appeal is atmosphere, lighting or sound, a GIF can undersell it, and the trailer and high-resolution screenshots do the job better. And a page with ten looping GIFs can feel frantic and load slowly on weak connections. Two to five well-chosen loops usually beat a wall of them.

Flockbay's Video studio films your game from its own controls and cuts clips from real play, which you can turn into GIFs for the page with the recipe above. Its Steam page drafts About This Game as header-and-sentence sections ready for those clips, and exports the page as a .zip you upload yourself. Video studio and the drafting are free in beta until 1 December 2026.