From 1st September Valve is implementing changes on Steam that will change the way you see new games on the platform.
The small thumbnails for games – called “Graphical Asset Capsules” by Valve – will be subject to new rules that limit extraneous text and other promotional material inside of these images.
Valve provides a few examples, which you can see above, which are littered with this type of text.
Going forward the graphical assets will be limited to the title’s name (plus official subtitle) as well as the game’s artwork.
The following are now prohibited under the new rules:
- “No review scores of any kind, including Steam reviews or external news sources
- No award names, symbols, or logos
- No discount marketing copy (eg. no ‘On Sale Now’ or ‘Up to 90% off’ text)
- No text or imagery promoting a different product. This includes no marketing of sequels or other titles in the same franchise.
- No other miscellaneous text.”
Several reasons are given for these changes with the main one being clarity and the ability for users to easily see and read the images attached to games. The review scores can also be misleading if they are out of date too.
“Any game not adhering to these rules may have limits to visibility within the Steam store and will be ineligible for featuring in official Steam sales and events,” the announcement reads.
Not all limited-time content and promotional material is banned, however. Valve gives the example of big game updates and new content additions which could sway users to click on a game.
This comes with the caveat that the change must be done using the Temporary Artwork Override function which has a limit of one month, and any included text but be localised into several languages.
The localisation is determined by the number of languages supported in the game; the artwork must be translated into at least those languages.
An example is provided below:
