The template
Three slots, in this order:
[Genre] where you [the thing you repeatedly do], except [the one difference].
That is the whole structure. The order is not cosmetic.
- Genre first, because it tells the reader which shelf they are on. A reader who cannot place your game in two words stops reading. It is also the slot most pages leave empty: across 689 top-selling Steam games, only 215 (31%) name a genre in the opening clause of their short description, and 285 never name one at all.
- The core loop second, because it is what the player will actually be doing. Use the verb. "Build and defend a settlement" beats "experience a world of survival and consequence", which describes no activity at all.
- The difference third, and only one of them. Two differences read as a list of features. One reads as a reason to click.
Filled in, against a real shelf: "A colony sim where you keep a crew alive underground, except every resource you spend permanently changes the map." Genre, loop, difference.
Your difference is only legible against your comparable titles
The third slot is where most pitches fail, and the reason is structural rather than stylistic: a difference is a comparison, and a comparison needs something to compare against.
A comparable title, or comp, is a released game whose buyers are the buyers you are competing for. If you have not built that list, how to pick comparable titles for your Steam game is the method.
Once you have five to ten comps, the test is mechanical. Write your difference, then ask: is this sentence also true of my comps? If it is true of most of them, it is a genre convention, not a difference, and the slot is still empty.
Phrases that usually fail this test, in our experience: atmospheric, challenging, hand-crafted, deep systems, a story that matters, beautiful pixel art, roguelike elements. That is our judgement, not a measurement.
What we did measure points the same way: across 689 top-selling Steam short descriptions these words are rare, with story or narrative language the most frequent at 58 descriptions and atmospheric appearing in 3.
How long the sentence can be: a median of 224 characters
Steam's short description is the field that carries this sentence.
Valve's own store documentation puts it "at the very top of your game's store page", says it is used "in locations on Steam where real estate is limited", and describes it only as "limited to a few hundred characters" without publishing an exact cap.
So we measured it. We took every distinct game appearing in the top-five list of each of 358 Steam tags, 689 games in all, and pulled each one's short description from Steam's public store API on 2026-09-18. No game failed to return:
| Short description length | Value |
|---|---|
| Shortest | 22 characters |
| Lower quartile | 163 characters |
| Median | 224 characters |
| Upper quartile | 269 characters |
| Longest | 341 characters |
| Over 300 characters | 18 of 689 |
Two things follow.
Valve names no number, but 300 characters is the practical ceiling. 671 of the 689 came in at 300 characters or fewer, and the 18 that ran past it stopped at 341.
Nothing we measured used a thousand characters, because the surfaces this text appears in do not have room for one.
The median is 224, which is roughly two sentences. That is the budget. It is not much, and it is the reason the template above has exactly three slots and no fourth.
Two caveats, because they change how you should read this. These are the top sellers in each tag, not a random draw from the Steam catalogue, so it describes what commercially successful store pages do, not what the average store page does.
The sales ranking that picks those titles comes from third-party estimates rather than from Valve, who publishes no such ranking; the short descriptions themselves come straight from Steam.
Four ways the sentence goes wrong
It opens with tone instead of genre. "In a world where nothing is certain..." has spent forty characters of a two-hundred-character budget without saying what the game is. Lead with the noun.
It lists features instead of naming one difference. A pitch carrying four differentiators reads as a changelog. Pick the one you would defend in an argument and cut the rest; they can live in the About This Game section below, which has room.
It uses words only the team understands. An internal nickname for a mechanic is invisible to a first-time reader. If the word would need a sentence of explanation, it cannot go in a sentence this short.
It describes the story rather than the play. Players buying on a store page are deciding what they will be doing, not what happens to the protagonist. Narrative-led games are not exempt: the loop is still reading, choosing and living with the consequence, and naming it beats summarising the plot.
Then test it, which is a different job
Writing the sentence and finding out whether it works are separate steps, and this page only covers the first.
Testing your message, distributing it as a hook plus a visual, and reading the funnel that comes back are covered in how to market a Steam game, which treats the pitch as something you run against real players rather than settle in a meeting.
The one thing worth saying here: a pitch that your team likes and strangers do not understand is a failed pitch, and the test is whether it survives a stranger reading it once, at speed, with no context.
Sources: Valve's own Steamworks store documentation for where the short description appears and how it is described; length figures measured by Immutable on 2026-09-18 across 689 top-selling Steam titles via Steam's public store API.
