Main capsule specification
| Requirement | What to deliver |
|---|---|
| Canvas | 1232 × 706 px |
| Placement | Main Capsule carousel on the Steam store home page |
| Content | Game logo and graphically led key art |
| Text | Game name and any official subtitle only; no review scores, awards or discount copy |
| Durability | Stable base artwork; any capsule text about an update or event must go on an Artwork Override (a temporary replacement capsule Valve lets you upload for an event), one month maximum |
A capsule is one of the fixed-size images Steam uses to represent your game across the store and library. The 1232 × 706 frame is close to 16:9, which tempts studios to drop in a screenshot.
Treat the frame as capsule art instead: one clear subject, a readable logo and an immediate promise about the game.
Design for a personalized carousel
Steam's home-page main capsule is personalized, not curated by Valve. Valve says the main capsule is different for every customer and is based on games they own, games they play, games their friends play and top sellers.
Valve also says the home page is driven by what players spend time and money on rather than by Valve curation. Your image therefore arrives after Steam has inferred possible relevance, but before the player understands your pitch.
Use the art to answer two questions in under a second: what kind of game is this, and what is the fantasy? A tactical game might foreground command and scale; a character action game might foreground the protagonist and motion. A generic landscape answers neither.
Design checklist
- Build at 1232 × 706 from Valve's current store-asset template pack, rather than upscaling an older asset.
- Reserve one high-contrast area for the logo.
- Give one subject visual priority; supporting subjects should not compete at thumbnail size.
- Test the image with the title hidden. The art should still signal genre or experience.
- Test the logo with the art blurred and in greyscale.
- Remove awards, reviews, feature lists and calls to action.
- Compare the final at carousel size, around 840 × 481 px on a desktop home page, against neighbouring games in the same genre.
Get a structured second opinion from the free Steam Capsule Analyzer, which scores six dimensions from 1 to 10: genre clarity, title readability, contrast and colour, uniqueness and polish, brand consistency and composition.
Those six scores are a judgement, not a measurement (no contrast ratio is computed). The reasoning behind those six dimensions is in the guide to Steam capsule art.
Common main-capsule mistakes
- Using a gameplay screenshot with a logo placed over it, without creating a readable focal hierarchy.
- Filling the larger source canvas with detail that disappears when Steam renders the carousel. On a desktop store home page the carousel is served the full 1232 × 706 file and draws it at roughly 840 × 481 px (checked September 2026), and a half-size 616 × 353 version of the same asset is used in other store rails.
- Making the asset visually unrelated to the header, small and vertical capsules.
- Adding temporary launch copy to the permanent asset instead of using an Artwork Override. Award names and symbols are not permitted on either: overrides only allow text describing a major update, seasonal event, battle pass, DLC or similar new content.
Sources: Valve's own Steamworks documentation on store graphical assets, visibility on Steam, graphical asset rules and capsule artwork overrides, checked September 2026, plus our own measurement of the live Steam store home page in September 2026.
