How to localize your Steam store page

It is easy to assume Steam is an English-speaking store. Valve's own documentation says otherwise: over 60% of Steam users use it in a language other than English. Its September 2026 hardware survey puts numbers on it: English 34.20%, Simplified Chinese 31.39%, Russian 9.05%, Spanish (Spain) 4.08%, Brazilian Portuguese 3.70%, German 2.48%, Japanese 2.41%, French 2.08%.

A store page in a player's own language is the cheapest way to look like a game made for them. It costs a few hundred words of translation, needs no change to the game, and can go up long before the game itself is translated, months before launch, while the page is still collecting wishlists. Valve even suggests using it as an experiment: translate the page, then look at regional wishlists to see where the game might be popular.

From Valve's localization and store page documentation:

Valve is explicit that language support on Steam is determined by the game's in-game language settings, not by the store page. Each language you list shows as Interface, Full Audio or Subtitles. List only what the game really has.

That separation is useful. A translated page for a game that is English-only, with the languages box saying so plainly, is honest and reads as care. A translated page that implies a translated game is a broken promise, and it shows up in refunds and reviews written in that language. If you plan to translate the game later, say so in the description in that language, as a plan, not a promise.

1. Make the images textless. Screenshots, GIFs and description banners without baked-in text serve every language at once. Valve's own advice is to use textless images where possible.
2. Write the English page to be translated: short sentences, no idioms or puns that only work in English, feature names that can be translated.
3. Translate the short description first, then About This Game, then the capsule if the title itself is localized.
4. Have a native speaker read it. Machine translation of marketing copy shows, and a stiff first line reads worse than good English.
5. Enter each language from the dropdown in each text editor, and preview the page in that language before publishing.
6. Set the languages table honestly: Interface, Full Audio, Subtitles, per language.
7. Watch regional wishlists in Steamworks to decide which languages the game itself should get.
8. Announce new languages as an update, with an event in each language.

Start with the languages with the most Steam users and the least English reading: Simplified Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Japanese and French cover most of Steam's non-English users. Valve's own rule of thumb points the same way: the less a language looks like English, the higher the expected return. Then follow your own wishlist data, because a genre's audience is not spread like Steam's. Our guide to which languages first has the full September 2026 table and a priority method.

Machine and AI translation make a first pass cheap, and for a store page a good model plus a native speaker's review is a sensible budget route. Two cautions. Check the translated text against Valve's store rules, because a translator can reintroduce a time-bound phrase such as "available now". And if AI translation ships in the game or on the store page, include it in your AI disclosure: Valve names localisation as content players consume. In Flockbay's measured sample, 5.14% of Steam games released from January to August 2026 disclosed AI translation. See the Steam AI disclosure guide.

Steamworks breaks your numbers down by region, which is how a translation earns its place:

• Wishlists by country, from the wishlist report, before and after the page went up in a language. A rise in the countries that speak it is the signal Valve suggests watching.
• Store page traffic by country, from the traffic reports: more visits and a better wishlist rate per visit from that market.
• Sales and refunds by country after launch. A translated page with an English-only game should not raise refunds in that language; if it does, the languages table is not being read, and the description should say "interface in English" in that language.

Give each change a few weeks without a sale, a festival or a big update in the window, so the comparison measures the translation and not the traffic around it. Then decide which languages earn a translated game, not just a translated page.

• Text baked into screenshots, so the localized page shows English images under translated text.
• Translating About This Game but not the short description, which most visitors read first.
• A localized name nobody searches for. Players often know a game by its English name; localize the name only when the market uses a translated title.
• Ticking Full Audio for subtitles, or Interface for a language the menus do not have.
• Forgetting the update. A new language is news; an event in that language tells the players who were waiting for it.

Flockbay's Steam page drafts the store page in English from your game, uses textless frames for the capsules and screenshots so they serve every language, and exports the page as a .zip you upload yourself; the languages table follows what the game supports. Preparing the page by hand and its .zip are free; drafting is free in beta until 1 December 2026.