What You Need to Publish Your Game's Page on Steam

ascjogos
Jun 21
4 min read

Publishing a game on Steam costs $100 USD, a one-time fee per product, refunded once your game reaches $1,000 in adjusted gross revenue on the platform. But the financial side is the straightforward part.

About four months ago we launched the page for [Something Meaningful](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4006300/Something_Meaningful/?utm_source=ascjogos&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=devlog2), a 2D RPG with webcore aesthetics developed by Mon Ami Interactive. We reached 3,000+ wishlists with no external funding and a three-person team. This article is the written companion to our second dev diary, where we break down the full process on video.

https://youtu.be/39CUHXf1TPc

Before You Publish

There's a real tension in indie development: you want to create your page as early as possible to build wishlists, but publishing too soon can be just as damaging as publishing too late. Game marketing specialist Chris Zukowski defines four criteria we used as our benchmark:

A well-defined genre and art style. If you publish as a pixel art roguelike and later shift to a 3D low-poly RPG, you break the expectations of everyone who already wishlisted your game and those players may not only remove it from their list, but carry a negative first impression even after you update the page. From day one, we committed to a single direction: 2D RPG with webcore aesthetics, and everything on the page reinforces that.

Demonstrated visual variety. Screenshots showing the same scene from different angles waste valuable real estate. Anyone visiting your page needs to see that this is a concrete project with multiple environments, mechanics, and situations. Our initial set of six images covers exploration, combat, dialogue, UI, a results screen, and a card game, each one communicates a different layer of the game.

A trailer. Technically optional, practically essential. It's the single asset that most effectively conveys gameplay, visuals, and variety at a glance. Our first trailer was made in-house with basic editing and a commissioned soundtrack. It served its purpose, but we're now producing a professional trailer with a hired editor, because we learned firsthand how much it affects conversion.

A quality capsule image. This is the most critical and most underestimated investment. The capsule is the artwork shown when your game is recommended on Steam, it's the first thing most people will ever see. The gap between a capsule that captures your game's essence and a generic one can be the difference between 100 and 1,000 wishlists. For Something Meaningful, we commissioned three different artists and gathered feedback from development forums before making a final call.

Page Optimization

Three adjustments that make a real difference:

Tags. Steam allows up to 20, but the first five carry the most weight in the recommendation algorithm. The goal is to position your game alongside genuinely similar titles, use comparable games as a reference when calibrating your choices.
GIFs. Effective for showcasing gameplay quickly, as long as file sizes stay light. Long loops increase load times, and every extra second of loading is a chance to lose a visitor.
Localization. We prioritized languages based on the Steam Hardware & Software Survey. English and Simplified Chinese together account for over 60% of the platform's users. We chose to hire human translators because automated tools frequently miss contextual nuance, and for a game as culturally layered as ours, that matters.

The Real Publishing Process

After paying the fee, you build your page in Steamworks: descriptions, images, trailer, tags. Then you submit for review, in our case, approval took about three business days.

And when you finally go live... nothing happens. You have to bring people to the page yourself.

From the day we published, we posted consistently across social media and built traction in both Brazilian and international communities.

One important caveat: short-form video has excellent reach, but without a clickable link in the description, conversion drops sharply. Users have to search for your game manually and given that most are on mobile, often not logged into Steam, a significant portion of that intent never converts.

Real Results After 4 Months

Four months since launch, we're at 3,000+ wishlists. Whether that's good or bad depends on your perspective. To appear in Steam's "Upcoming Releases" section, a meaningful driver of organic visibility, you need at least 7,000. We still have ground to cover.

But with a three-person team handling development, marketing, and video editing simultaneously, and no external funding, it's a result that validates the effort and the product. During this period, we participated in several Steam festivals, three in-person events in the greater Florianópolis area (RetroSC, Passeio Geek, and a Univali event at their Florianópolis campus), ran closed playtests, and watched people play for over an hour in live sessions.

The next step is an open playtest on Steam, followed by iteration before releasing a public demo. A demo launched at the wrong moment can hurt a game's long-term prospects, it needs to come after feedback, not before.

If you want to follow the development, add [Something Meaningful](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4006300/Something_Meaningful/?utm_source=ascjogos&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=devlog2) to your wishlist. Every wishlist carries real weight in the platform's algorithm, and makes it more likely that others will discover the game organically.