What to Include In Steam Game Description // Writing Game Descriptions
115In this video I go through the different description sections on Steam and then most importantly, what you should write in each of them.
➤ Chambers of Devious Design: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1650860?utm_source=yt
➤ Mortal Glory: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1097530?utm_source=yt
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How to Get a Game on Steam // Creating a Steam Page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwb1HV8KTx8
Music by Harris Heller, StreamBeats.com
0:00 Intro
0:48 Short Description
Here you can use up to 300 characters to describe your game, which will then be shown at the top of your steam page. You should treat this section as an opportunity to pique the interest of a potential customer. When someone reads your short description, it is likely that they have either heard about your game somewhere or they just stumbled upon it on Steam and now they want to find out if it’s a game they might want to try out.
Because of the character limitation, you will need to express your ideas in a very concise format. You don’t need to explain what the whole game is about, but just try to give a quick idea what kind of a game it is. If you have an interesting hook in your game, this would be a good place to mention about it. Likewise, if your game has an interesting thematic setting, it’s a good idea to bring that up in the short description.
The short description is also a good place to make it clear for the reader which genres your game falls into. You don’t NEED to do this, but often players are seeking games from specific genres so you can help them out by using genre-defining words here like “survival” or “souls-like”.
Maybe a good general tip would be to include in the short description whatever you think is the most interesting thing about your game overall - as long as 300 characters is enough to describe it. Also keep in mind that at this point the customer is not familiar with your game so the interesting thing has to be something that the customer can easily understand without any existing knowledge about your game.
3:57 Long Description
My theory is that most customers won’t read this section. They might glance at it, maybe read a few words here and there but they are likely to skip through most of it.
If they do read it through, you can expect that they are very interested in your game and just want to know a bit more about it before they make up their mind. Most likely they are planning on buying it or at least wishlisting it and now they are just seeking additional information to support their decision.
So with this in mind, I would say that with the long description, you have two objectives. Number one, the primary objective, is to convey the key selling points of your game to the majority of the customers, who just glance through your text. So basically, just list the most interesting things your game has to offer. Then, number two, the secondary objective, is to provide enough relevant information about your game to support a decision to buy for the minority of customers, who do read through your text.
(Video shows examples how to reach these objectives. The text for that was too long for this description)
8:15 Reviews, Awards & Special Announcements
There are also optional sections you can add to your Steam page above the long description. These are reviews, awards and a special announcement section. The reviews & awards are pretty self-explanatory. If your game has gotten some good reviews or awards, it might be a good idea to add a separate mention about them on your page with these sections.
The special announcement section is more free-form and you can customize it as you wish. You don’t see it used very often, but I think it can be a good place to promote a Discord server for the game or maybe do some cross-promotion for a sequel to the game or something like that. You can also customize the visibility based on a country-by-country basis so this would be a good place to promote a region-specific contest for example.