What you actually get at each price
The most useful thing to know before commissioning anything is where original illustration begins. Across current marketplace listings, every offer below roughly $100 was one of two things: a concept sketch, or photo manipulation of assets you supply yourself. Both are legitimate. Neither is what most developers mean by capsule art.
| Band | What it buys | Typical turnaround |
|---|---|---|
| Under $100 | Concept sketch, or a reformat of your existing art into capsule sizes | 2 to 3 days |
| $150 to $260 | Original illustration, one capsule size or a basic set of four, 1 revision | 5 to 7 days |
| $350 to $425 | Original illustration with title and logo treatment, all standard store sizes, source files | 7 to 14 days |
| $650 | Every asset Steam accepts, including library capsule, library hero, page background, icons | 10 days |
| Around $1,000 | The full set plus a brand identity document and social and Discord assets | 21 days |
Figures are August 2026 marketplace list prices, not negotiated rates. The $150 to $650 bands each have three or more independent sellers behind them. The $1,000 tier came from one listing, so treat it as indicative.
Hiring an established professional directly costs more than the top of that table. That band is poorly documented in public, and the figures that circulate for it trace back to guidance published in 2020 to 2022, so we will not pretend a current number exists. Treat the marketplace ceiling as your floor and expect to negotiate.
What moves the price
The add-ons are unusually consistent across sellers, which makes them easy to budget for:
- Each additional figure or character in the composition: around +$100. This is the biggest single lever after original-versus-rework. A one-subject capsule is materially cheaper than a hero shot with a party of four.
- Rush delivery: +$40 to +$250, scaling with how far you compress the schedule. Cutting 14 days to 5 sits at the top of that range.
- Each extra capsule size: around +$30. This is why the ladder from one size to four to the full set climbs the way it does.
- Extra revisions: around +$45 each. Worth reading carefully, because included revisions are strikingly low across the market, usually one or two.
- Source files are frequently gated behind the higher tiers rather than included. If you ever want to produce seasonal variants or localised versions yourself, you need them, so check before you buy rather than after.
- Commercial rights are included by some sellers and priced separately by others. Confirm in writing.
How to spend it well
Capsule art gates everything else on your store page: nobody reads a description they did not click. Average indie capsule click-through sits below 2%, while titles clearing 4% earn meaningfully more visibility in Steam's discovery queues and search. The gap between a $150 capsule and a $400 one is small next to the gap between a 1.5% and a 4% click-through rate.
- Pay for the small capsule, not the big one. The small capsule is the 462 x 174 px asset Steam uses in search results and new-release lists, and it renders as low as 120 x 45 pixels, which is where most discovery happens. Brief the artist on thumbnail legibility explicitly and judge the result at that size. A capsule that dissolves into mush at 120 x 45 is a wasted commission.
- Buy the source files, even on a tight budget. You will want to test variants, refresh before a festival, and eventually localise. Paying +$50 up front beats re-commissioning.
- Score the candidates before you pay the final invoice. Check each option for genre clarity, title readability, contrast, uniqueness, brand consistency, and composition. Our free Steam capsule analyser scores a capsule 0 to 100 on those six dimensions and returns ranked fixes, so you can compare candidates on one scale instead of on taste. Catching a weak capsule in draft costs nothing; catching it after two weeks of live traffic costs the traffic.
For the design criteria themselves, see our guide to Steam capsule art. For exact upload dimensions and templates to hand your artist, see Steam capsule sizes. Capsule art is one of several elements that move store-page conversion, covered in how to optimise your Steam store page.
Sources: freelance marketplace listings for Steam capsule commissions, surveyed August 2026 (each price band supported by three or more independent sellers). Steamworks documentation on store graphical assets for capsule sizes and small-capsule legibility. Capsule click-through figures are directional benchmark data from Immutable's game CDP.
