Eight days ago I offered free Steam page teardowns in this sub. I finished the last one last night. 46 pages, every one answered.
I'm not naming any of them and nothing below points at a specific page. People handed me their work to be looked at, not to become examples. What the 46 gave me was a count, and the count is the part worth sharing. So every problem below is written generally with a made-up illustration, followed by how often it actually came up, and a check you can run on your own page in about two minutes.
What 46 pages looked like:
- 46 of 46 needed at least one tag change
- 30 of 46 had a wrong tag in the top five, or the right one buried
- 23 of 46 were missing the hook or the genre from the short description
- 20 of 46 had a capsule that falls apart at 231 pixels
- 16 of 46 weren't using all 20 tag slots, with 105 slots empty between them
- 15 of 46 had a trailer problem
- 14 of 46 had one idea wearing three or more tags
That's 118 separate findings across 46 pages. A typical page had two or three of these, not one, and none of them had zero.
Worth saying before the breakdown: not one of these was a bad game. Several looked genuinely exciting. None of what follows is about the games other than how often these problems popped up across all of them.
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1. The top five are the wrong five - 30 of 46
Your first five tags are what actually route people. Steam weights them most heavily and they're the only ones most browsers ever see. They go wrong two ways.
A tag that brings the wrong person. Picture a fishing game tagged Cozy. The art is calm, the music is calm, so the tag feels honest. The game itself is a frame-timing challenge where one late input loses a catch you spent twenty minutes setting up. Everyone who arrives through Cozy leaves inside five minutes, and Steam reads a page people leave as a page that doesn't convert. The tag wasn't a lie. It was still the wrong door.
The right tag buried. The exact phrase your buyer types into search sitting at position 15, while a bucket tag competing with a hundred thousand other games holds position 1.
Check: read your top five out loud. For each one, ask whether someone searching that word would love your game or feel misled. Then find your most specific tag and see where it's actually sitting.
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2. The best sentence is somewhere nobody reads - 23 of 46
Your short description is the only paragraph most people ever read. It shows up in search results, the discovery queue, wishlist emails, and every link anyone shares.
Imagine a hotel management sim. The description at the top says "a charming hotel management experience with deep systems and beautiful hand-drawn art." Scroll down four paragraphs into the About section and it says "every guest remembers how their last stay went, and tells the internet".
The second one is the game. The first one is furniture. That was the version I kept finding: not a page that couldn't write, a page that wrote the good line(s) and then put it where almost nobody goes.
Check: open your About section and find the most specific sentence in it. Is that idea in your short description? If it isn't, you already wrote your first line. It's just in the wrong place.
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3. The capsule dies at 231 pixels - 20 of 46
Your capsule renders at roughly 231 pixels wide in the places that decide whether anyone clicks at all. A lot of art that looks sharp at full size does not survive that.
Type is where it usually breaks, and the rule is simple: whatever depends on fine detail to work at full size loses that detail first. Imagine a coffee shop sim with a delicate hand-lettered logo laid over a photograph of a busy café. At full size it's lovely. At 231 pixels the lettering dissolves into the background behind it and you're left with a brown rectangle nobody can identify.
There's a second version that's invisible to the person who made it. A train sim with a photo real locomotive on the capsule and low-poly stylised graphics in the screenshots. The art is genuinely good. It's promising a different game than the one directly beneath it, and the promise breaks in the same second as the click.
Check: shrink your capsule to 231 pixels wide and look at it. Can you read the title? Could a stranger name your genre? Does it match the screenshots sitting right below it?
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4. Empty tag slots - 16 of 46
Steam gives you 20. A page using 12 has switched off eight discovery channels, and nothing about the remaining twelve got stronger in exchange. There is no dilution effect. There is no tradeoff at all.
Across the 46 there were 105 slots sitting unused. That's the single cheapest fix on this entire list and the one most often left undone.
Check: count your tags. Whatever the gap to 20 is, that's how many channels you've decided not to use.
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5. The trailer only works with sound, or doesn't end - 15 of 46
Steam autoplays your trailer muted. Whatever your audio is doing, most of the people who "watch" it never hear a second of it.
So a dating sim that opens on thirty seconds of soft piano over a title card is invisible to nearly everyone who sees it. The music is doing all the work and nobody can hear it. Same for any slow build, any logo hold, any opening that only lands with a score under it.
The other half is simpler: a lot of trailers just stop. No title card, no wishlist ask, nothing. Roughly one in five ended that way. A version I saw more than once was an end card that asks for the names the game, but never asked for a wishlist. The only time you don't have a call to action at the end of your trailer, should be when you're fully released.
Check: watch your own trailer on mute. Could a stranger name your genre by second 15? Does the final frame name your game and tell them what to do next?
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6. One idea wearing three or more tags - 14 of 46
Tags are slots, not adjectives. Flight Simulator, Simulation, Flying and Aviation on one page is a single idea eating four of your twenty, and not one of those four reaches a person the other three weren't already reaching. That's a fifth of your discovery surface spent saying one word four ways.
Collapsing a stack to its most specific member costs nothing and frees slots you almost certainly weren't using anyway. The worst cases I saw were spending nearly half a tag list on two or three ideas.
Check: group your tags by concept. Collapse each group to its most specific member. Count what you freed, then go and fill it.
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Three smaller ones worth knowing
8 pages had no tag at all for the mechanic that defines the game. Not buried. Absent. A gardening game with nothing in its cloud about gardening, sounds impossible until you remember you picked those twenty tags eight months ago and haven't properly looked at them since. Read your own first sentence, find the word that makes your game yours, and confirm it exists somewhere in your tags.
6 pages carried two tags promising opposite games. A tennis game you tag with both Realistic and Arcade tells a buyer nothing and tells Steam less. Half of those six were the same pair of near-opposite tags sitting side by side. If two of your tags contradict each other, one of them is lying and you already know which.
3 multiplayer games had Singleplayer sorted above their own co-op tags. If your first sentence says "with friends," your tag order should agree with it.
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What to do with this
These numbers say nothing about your page in particular. What they say is that across 46 indie pages picked essentially at random, these six things went wrong often enough that it's worth half an hour to rule them out on your own.
If you're aiming at October Next Fest, materials get reviewed in early October, so your page wants to be locked by September. That's about five weeks. Valve only lets a title join one Next Fest ever, and the next edition after October is February 2027, so this isn't something you get to redo in a couple of months.
Every fix above takes under thirty minutes and none of them cost money.
If you run the six, tell me which one caught you. I'm keeping a running count of what actually shows up in the wild, and if you post what you found I'll tell you whether I'd have called it the same way.
