What should I ask a Steam capsule artist for before hiring them?

Ask for capsule work specifically, not general illustration, shown at roughly 120 x 45 pixels so you can check whether genre and title still read. Then ask what revisions are included, whether source files and full commercial rights come with delivery, and what the turnaround is against a fixed date.

Do I need an artist who has worked on Steam games before?

Not strictly, but they need experience at thumbnail scale. Steam capsules have fixed crops, several required sizes, and Valve rules prohibiting review scores, awards and marketing copy on base assets. An artist from another medium can learn that, but you pay for the learning curve.

How many revisions should be included in a capsule commission?

Expect one or two, which is lower than most developers assume. Because the revision budget is thin, the brief carries the weight: name the genre signal, the key visual, the required sizes and the thumbnail-legibility test before work starts.

How do you choose a Steam capsule artist?

Score the portfolio against the six criteria, not on general appeal

Use the criteria a finished capsule gets judged on. The small capsule is the one that matters here: the 462 x 174 px asset Steam uses in search results and new-release lists, which it renders as far down as 120 x 45. Scale each portfolio piece to that size in a browser, then work through the table.

Criterion	What to check	Fail signal
Genre clarity	Can you name the genre from the thumbnail alone, with the title covered?	You have to read the title to know what kind of game it is
Title readability	The logo nearly fills the small capsule and stays legible at 120 x 45	Titles turn into a grey smear at thumbnail scale
Contrast and colour	Blur it, then convert it to greyscale. Does it still separate?	The composition depends on hue alone and flattens in greyscale
Uniqueness and polish	Set it beside the top five capsules in your genre	Interchangeable with its neighbours, so you are paying for competence rather than differentiation
Brand consistency	A repeatable visual signature (font treatment, accent colour, framing device) they can carry across the set	Every piece in the portfolio is a one-off with no through-line
Composition	One clear focal point that survives Steam's hard crops across surfaces	Three competing subjects, or a subject that breaks when the frame changes shape

Our free Steam capsule analyser scores an existing capsule 0 to 100 on these same six dimensions, so you can run a shortlisted artist's previous Steam work through it and compare candidates on the same scale rather than on taste. The design reasoning behind each criterion is in our guide to Steam capsule art.

Weight the criteria against your own situation

The six criteria matter to every game; the order does not.

If this is you	Weight hardest	Why
Your genre is crowded	Uniqueness and genre clarity	In a saturated tag the gap is won on differentiation, not finish quality
You already have key art	Composition and typography, not illustration	You are buying adaptation across sizes, a cheaper skill than originating a hero image
You are pre-Coming Soon	Brand consistency	A festival page, demo and launch refresh all follow; a one-image artist means re-commissioning at every beat
You are close to launch	Turnaround and revision terms	A very good artist who needs six weeks is the wrong hire for a page going live in three

Average indie capsule click-through sits below 2%, while titles clearing 4% earn meaningfully more visibility in Steam's discovery queues and search, which is why the crowded-genre case weights differentiation over polish. If you already own key art, see how much Steam capsule art costs for what adaptation-only scope runs to, and commissioning versus doing it yourself for whether you need an artist at all.

Brief and terms: what to settle before you pay

Specify four things in the brief:

The genre signal a player should read in under a second.
The single key visual.
The exact capsule sizes you need, listed explicitly. Dimensions and templates are in Steam capsule sizes.
That the result gets judged at 120 x 45, not at full resolution.

Valve prohibits review scores, awards and marketing text on base capsules, so an artist wanting accolade badges needs redirecting to an artwork override, a temporary capsule with an automatic expiry.

Then agree four things commercially:

Revisions. Included rounds are typically only one or two across the freelance market, so price extra rounds up front.
Source files. Often gated to higher tiers, and without them you cannot produce seasonal variants or localise later.
Commercial rights. Get the grant in writing.
Turnaround. Tie it to a date on your store-page timeline, not to a working-days estimate.

Red flags

A portfolio shown only at full resolution. Capsule work presented as large hero images is untested at the size Steam actually uses.
No Steam-specific work at all. Illustration skill does not transfer automatically to a format with fixed crops, five size variants and platform content rules.
Unwillingness to supply source files. This locks you into re-hiring for every future variant, and it is a commercial position, not a technical constraint.
Vagueness about rights.Hesitation about commercial use, or a licence limited to "promotional purposes", needs resolving before the first payment.
Pushing to a full asset set before a concept is agreed. The cheapest place to find out a capsule does not work is a sketch.

Sources: Steamworks documentation on store graphical assets and graphical asset rules (small-capsule legibility, prohibited content on base capsules). Freelance marketplace listings surveyed August 2026 for included revisions and source-file terms. Capsule click-through figures are directional benchmark data from Immutable's game CDP. No public dataset links artist-selection criteria to capsule performance, so the framework here is derived from the criteria a finished capsule is judged on.