Core discovery terms
Surface: any one place on Steam where a game can appear, such as a queue, a list, a tag page, search results or a recommendation strip. Each surface has its own eligibility rules and its own ranking, which is why there is no single Steam algorithm.
The pages in this cluster use "surface" and "placement" for the same idea.
Algorithmic visibility: Steam showing a game because its systems predict that the game is relevant to a particular player. The store is personalized, so two players can see different games in the same area.
Impression: a recorded display of your game in a Steam placement. An impression is upstream of a store-page visit; it does not mean the player clicked.
Visit: a unique load of your store page that came from a Steam placement. Divide visits by impressions for a derived impression-to-visit rate, but do not mistake that rate for an input to Steam's visibility systems: Valve says conversion rate is not a visibility factor.
Organic visibility: additional Steam placement earned as customers respond to a product, rather than a placement purchased from Valve. Valve says players, purchases and play are strong signals.
Personalization: Steam adapting recommendations to each customer using signals including owned and played games, friends' activity and relevant tags.
Pre-launch and launch surfaces
Popular Upcoming: a pre-release list, and the example Valve gives when it says wishlists are not a factor in algorithmic visibility "with a few exceptions like the Popular Upcoming tab".
Valve also states that visibility on lists such as Popular Upcoming depends on release date, and publishes no wishlist threshold, so a fixed number cannot guarantee entry.
All New Releases: the new-releases list Valve links from the Steam home page. A full release appears here as one of the placements Steam gives automatically at launch. Early Access launches appear instead in the "All New Releases" tab of the Early Access section.
New Releases Queue: a personalized queue used at full release. Steam draws from recently released titles, prioritizes games with fewer views since release, then filters per user: Valve says a title can be filtered out based on its associated tags or the type of product it is.
New & Trending: an earned launch-period list for games doing well. A game can leave quickly when other popular products release, so this is a competitive rank rather than a promised duration.
Top Sellers: a sales-rank surface that can appear on the home page and relevant genre or tag pages.
Recommendation and browse surfaces
Discovery Queue: a personalized sequence of game recommendations, still reachable from Steam's own store navigation and available only to signed-in players (checked September 2026). It should not be confused with the New Releases Queue, which is one of the placements a game receives automatically at full release.
More Like This: recommendations on store pages based partly on overlap among a game's top tags. Valve says the more tags that overlap between two games, the stronger the correlation and the recommendation, and that some of its recommendation algorithms factor in less-frequently-used tags more than really common ones.
Tag pages and browse views: lists determined by a game's top tags. Valve says the top 20 tags determine the tag pages and similar browse views a game can appear on, and that some store filters prioritize the first 15.
Valve also says the top 5 should paint a clear picture of the game because those tags are also used to describe it. It documents no weighting curve across the individual slots, and says order matters less than overlap for recommendations.
Main Capsule: Steamworks uses this name twice. It is the required 1232 × 706 store asset, and it is also the name of the carousel at the top of the Steam store home page where that asset appears.
The carousel is personalized rather than curated by Valve: it can include popular new releases, top sellers, Early Access games, personalized recommendations, software and DLC, and Valve says it is different for every customer, based on games they own, games they play, games their friends play and top sellers.
Post-launch promotion and reporting
Update Visibility Round: one of five starting post-launch promotional rounds for a game. Each can run for up to 30 days or one million home-page impressions, whichever comes first.
The five are shared between Early Access and full release, and Valve may grant additional rounds to products that are selling well. See Steam Update Visibility Rounds explained for the full mechanics.
Traffic Breakdown: the Steamworks report reached from Marketing & Visibility and labelled "Store & Steam Platform Traffic Breakdown".
The report shows where on Steam a game was displayed on screen, how many impressions each placement produced, and how many unique store-page loads followed. Valve also summarises it across every game on a partner account.
Artwork Override: a temporary replacement capsule created from the Graphical Assets tab with its own start and end time, after which the art reverts automatically. It is not gated by taking part in a sale or event: any game with default capsules uploaded can set one up.
An Artwork Override is also the only place Valve allows capsule text about a major update, seasonal event, battle pass or DLC, capped at one month and required to be localised into at least the languages the game supports.
For the complete system and what a studio can control, use the guide to the Steam discovery algorithm.
