Steam capsule art: sizes, rules, and art that reads small

Search results, top sellers, new releases, wishlists, the Discovery Queue: the small capsule appears more often than any other image of your game, and Steam shrinks it to 184 by 69 and 120 by 45 for lists. At that size a title in thin type is a grey smear and a detailed scene is noise. A player scrolling a list decides in a fraction of a second whether your capsule is worth a click.

The obvious approach is to design the big, beautiful header capsule and scale it down. The better one is the reverse: design the smallest version first, because whatever survives at 120 by 45 will read at every larger size, and whatever does not will cost you clicks in exactly the places most players see you.

From Valve's Standard Store Graphical Assets documentation:

Valve's Store Graphical Asset Rules have applied since 1 September 2022:

• Allowed text: the game's name and an official subtitle. Nothing else.
• Not allowed: review scores of any kind, award names or laurels, discount copy such as "On Sale Now", calls to action such as "Prepurchase Now", anything promoting another product (sequels included), and other miscellaneous text.
• A readable logo or name on every capsule, at the exact dimensions, and PG-13 appropriate art.
• Updates and events get text only as an Artwork Override: up to a month, localised into the game's languages, about content already available.

Valve's guidance on content adds two points: the header, main and vertical capsules should use the key art and logo from your marketing and give a sense of the gameplay, and on the small capsule "your logo should nearly fill" the space, with art that does not need to match the other capsules. Games that break the rules may have their store visibility limited and are ineligible for featuring in Steam's official sales and events.

1. Pick one subject. A character, a creature, a vehicle, a single object that says the genre. Balatro's capsule, for instance, is essentially one playing card and the title: you know the game is about cards before you read a word.
2. Set the title in a heavy, simple face. The logo has to survive 120 by 45; decorative scripts and thin serifs do not.
3. Build the small capsule as its own design: the logo filling most of the space, the subject reduced to a colour field or a silhouette behind it.
4. Separate it from the page. Steam's store is dark; a dark capsule needs a bright edge, a light subject or a strong colour to stand out.
5. Match the game's look. The capsule sits next to your screenshots; if they look like different games, players trust neither.
6. Check every size at 100%, then at the real list size on a laptop screen and a phone, next to ten other capsules from your genre.

• A title in a thin or decorative font that vanishes at small sizes.
• A busy scene with no focal point, where the eye has nowhere to land.
• Art that promises a different game: a painted hero for a pixel-art puzzle game.
• Dark art on Steam's dark background, with nothing to separate it.
• The same composition squeezed into every shape, so the vertical capsule crops the subject's head off.
• Review scores, award laurels or "Coming Soon": not allowed, and they can cost the game its featuring.

Steam has no built-in A/B test for capsules, and Artwork Overrides are for time-limited update art, not experiments. The practical method is a before-and-after: run one capsule for a fixed period, note impressions and visits in Steamworks' store traffic report, swap, and compare a period of equal length. Avoid weeks with a sale, a festival or a big update, which swamp the difference, and compare the click-through rate (visits over impressions), not raw visits.

Before any of that, the cheapest test is people: show the small capsule at list size, in a grid of competitors' capsules, to someone who has never seen your game, and ask what kind of game it is. If they cannot say, the capsule is not doing its job.

Valve's guidance is that standard capsules should generally not change: they are how returning players and wishlisters recognise your game in a list. Three moments justify a new capsule anyway:

• Before launch, when the game's final art direction is settled and the placeholder capsule from the announcement no longer matches the screenshots.
• After a test shows a clear winner, measured as above.
• At a real change of identity: a 1.0 release after Early Access with new art, or a rename.

For everything temporary, a major update, a seasonal event, a DLC, use an Artwork Override instead: it can carry text about content that is available now, runs for up to a month, and reverts on its own, so the capsule players know comes back without anyone remembering to restore it.

Flockbay's Steam page cuts all the capsule and library images from one real frame of your running game, centred on the subject, with the title in plain type on a dark band, and tells you when a title will not read at the size Steam draws it. You can choose your own art instead. The page exports as a .zip you upload in Steamworks yourself. Drafting is free in beta until 1 December 2026; the page by hand and its .zip stay free.