How to write Steam system requirements for your game

A player with a five-year-old laptop scrolls to the system requirements before the reviews. If the minimum lists a graphics card they do not have, they leave. If it lists one they have and the game stutters, they refund within the two hours Steam allows. The requirements box is a promise, and like every promise on a store page, it should be measured.

Most indie developers fill it in last, from memory, by copying a similar game's box. That produces the two classic failures: a minimum so low the game runs badly on it, and a recommended so high it scares off players whose machines would have been fine. Both are fixable in an afternoon with the method below.

For each operating system you sell on, minimum and, optionally, recommended:

Valve's Steam Hardware & Software Survey is the best public picture of the machines your players own. For September 2026:

• Operating system: Windows 11 64-bit 71.34%, Windows 10 64-bit 23.61%, Linux 3.05%, macOS 1.92%.
• Memory: 32 GB 42.22%, 16 GB 37.82%, 8 GB 6.47%.
• Primary display: 1920x1080 47.91%, 2560x1440 27.04%.
• Video memory: 16 GB 27.21%, 8 GB 26.71%.
• CPU cores: 8 cores 30.06%, 6 cores 27.23%.

Two cautions. The survey describes Steam's whole audience, and an indie game's players skew towards older and cheaper hardware than the people buying new blockbusters. And Steam itself has required Windows 10 or later since 1 January 2024, so listing Windows 7 as a minimum promises something Steam cannot deliver.

1. Storage. Install the release build from Steam, read its size on disk, and round up to the next whole gigabyte. Add room for saves and shader caches if they grow.
2. Minimum. Run the game on the weakest machine you can borrow, at its lowest settings, through the heaviest scene, not the title screen. If it holds a playable frame rate (30 fps for most games, more for fast action), that machine is your minimum. Write its CPU, RAM and GPU.
3. Recommended. The machine that hits your target, often 60 fps at 1080p, at default settings.
4. Graphics API. Take it from your engine and renderer, not from habit; see the Godot table below.
5. Memory. Watch the game's peak memory use in a long session and add headroom for the OS: a game that peaks at 1.5 GB is honest at 4 GB minimum, not 2.
6. Mark estimates. If you could not test a class of hardware, say "estimated" in the notes. Better a cautious minimum than a refund.

Godot's own documentation (for Godot 4.7) lists the minimums for an exported project, which are the floor for the simplest game; your content adds to them:

Players do not benchmark; they compare names. So write requirements the way a player checks them:

• Name a model, then a class. "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 or AMD Radeon RX 560, 2 GB VRAM" lets a player compare; "a modern graphics card" does not.
• Say integrated graphics out loud if the game runs on them. Laptop players search the page for "Intel UHD" or "Radeon Vega", and a game that runs on integrated graphics should say so in the minimum.
• Give one CPU generation, not a clock speed. "Intel Core i5-4460 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200" means more than "2.5 GHz quad-core", because clock speeds across generations are not comparable.
• Use the notes field for what the table cannot hold: controller recommended, Steam Deck status, no internet needed, SSD recommended for load times.
• Keep minimum and recommended meaningfully apart. If they are the same, give only the minimum.

• Copying a bigger game's box. A small 2D game listing a GTX 1060 loses every player with integrated graphics who could have run it.
• Testing on your development machine. It is almost never representative.
• Forgetting the renderer. A Forward+ game cannot run on hardware without Vulkan or Direct3D 12 support, whatever its CPU.
• Ticking platforms you have not tested. Valve's build review checks the game starts on every operating system the page lists; tick Linux or macOS only with a tested build.
• A storage figure from the editor. The exported, compressed build is what players download.

The requirements appear near the bottom of the store page, per platform, with minimum and recommended side by side. Players read them, but so does the Steam Deck review in its own way: Valve's testers check the game runs well on the Deck's hardware whatever your box says. If you want the Deck's green tick, the target is 30 fps at 800p in default settings; see Steam Deck Verified. The requirements can be edited at any time, and they should be whenever a patch changes performance, a renderer switch moves the graphics floor, or the install grows.

Flockbay's Steam page writes the system requirements from the project's renderer and the size of the export, and says which figures it measured and which it estimated, for you to check. Its playtest links bring back errors and crashes from testers' own machines, which is the cheapest way to find the hardware your minimum should exclude. Preparing the page by hand and its .zip are free; the drafting and hosted playtests are free in beta until 1 December 2026.