How to write a Steam short description

On the store page the short description sits under the header capsule, beside the trailer, above the fold. It is the only copy most visitors read. It has to tell them what kind of game this is and why this one, before their eyes move to the price.

It has a second job most developers miss. Steam uses the short description as the page's meta description, the text search engines show under the link. Balatro's Steam page, for example, carries its short description word for word in that tag. So the same two sentences are your pitch on Steam and your snippet on Google, and they should work for a reader who has never seen the capsule.

• A few hundred characters. Valve gives no exact number; the editor stops you.
• Plain text only. Extra line breaks, bullets and other styling do not render.
• Nothing time-bound. No "Now Available", "Coming March 4" or "Prepurchase now": the text stays up after those stop being true.
• Lead with what sets it apart, and the genre. Valve's own advice.
• Translate it first when you localize: it is the text most visitors read.

How five well-known games use the field, from their Steam pages on 18 October 2026:

Four of the five open on what the player does or wants, not on the world: escape, play hands, explore, survive. All five name the genre in words a player would search for: roguelike, deckbuilder, dungeon crawler, action adventure, rogue-lite. Most name two or three concrete verbs. None mentions platforms, awards, prices or dates. And none is longer than about 270 characters, which leaves room on the page and in a search snippet.

Stardew Valley is the useful exception. It opens on the story setup rather than the verbs, because the fantasy, leaving the city for a farm, is the hook. Even then, the last line turns it into the player's goal.

Genre + what the player does + the twist. An illustrative example for a made-up game: "A cosy farming game where your crops are also your party: plant, grow and battle with vegetables in a village that remembers every harvest." One read and a player knows the genre, the verbs and the hook.

Then check it against three questions: would a player who loves this genre recognise it as theirs; could this sentence describe any other game; and does every claim describe something in the build today?

1. Write the hook in your own words, one sentence, before opening the editor.
2. Name the genre the way players search for it, ideally matching your top tags.
3. Add two or three verbs the player actually performs.
4. Add the twist: the one thing comparable games do not do.
5. Cut to under about 270 characters, removing adjectives first.
6. Read it as a search snippet: would it make sense under your game's name in a list of search results?
7. Write five versions and pick with someone who has not seen the game. Our free Steam short description writer drafts variants from a few facts.

The two fields do different jobs, and most weak short descriptions are About This Game sections squeezed into the wrong box. The short description answers "what is this and is it for me?" in one read. About This Game answers "what will I do for the next twenty hours?" for the visitors who scrolled because the short description worked. Put the hook, the genre and two or three verbs in the short field; put the feature list, the story, the modes, the content counts and any press quotes in the long one.

When you localize the page, translate the short description first, and have a native speaker read it: it is the line most visitors in that language will read, and in their search results it is your snippet too. Keep the genre word the one players in that language actually search for, which is not always the literal translation; many players search English genre terms such as "roguelike" in every language.

The short description can be edited and republished at any time, so treat it as something to improve. Change one thing at a time, leave it for a few weeks with no sale or festival in the window, and compare the wishlist rate per visit in Steamworks' reports before and after. A rewrite that names the genre more plainly or puts the strongest verb first often moves that rate more than any new screenshot.

• "An immersive adventure awaits": says nothing a player can picture.
• The story setup with no mention of play, unless the fantasy itself is the hook.
• A list of platforms, awards or features.
• A sentence that would fit any game in the genre.
• A time-bound phrase that will be wrong next month.
• A feature that is planned, not built; Valve's review checks the page against the game.

Flockbay's Steam page drafts the short description from your approved brief and three to five comparable games, applies Valve's rules as it writes, and marks it Drafted by Flockbay until you edit it. It exports the page as a .zip you upload yourself. Preparing the page by hand and its .zip are free; drafting is free in beta until 1 December 2026.