Hades Steam Page Teardown: Why It Scored 87 of 100

Hades has the highest-scoring store page in our sample: 87 out of 100, ahead of 372 other Steam pages that developers have run through our analyzer. It also has one of the shortest issue lists we have seen on a page of that quality. The only warning-level problem our analyzer raised against the best page in the set was the small capsule — a wordmark on a painted orange background, with no character and no gameplay in it at all.

That finding is worth sitting with, because the capsule is the element every marketing guide tells you to load with a face. Supergiant did the opposite and still built the page our rubric ranks first. This teardown works through what the analyzer flagged, checks each claim against the live page, and separates the parts you can copy from the parts that only work because the game is Hades.

Two things before we start. Our scores come from this product’s own rubric, not from Valve and not from sales data; they measure how well a page is built, not how much money it made. And the 373 pages in the sample are pages people chose to run through the free tool, so this is a convenience sample, not a random slice of Steam.

The analysis ran on June 11, 2026. We re-checked every claim in this post against the live page on July 26, 2026.

At the time of analysis the page carried 11 screenshots and 3 trailers, a 155-character short description, and a 3,551-character About section. The sample medians are 9 screenshots and 1 trailer, so Hades is above the line on media but nowhere near the top: the largest gallery in our set runs 48 screenshots.

The analyzer raised only two issues on the entire page. One warning (capsule) and one info-level note (tags). For comparison, the mean across all 373 pages is 6.4 issues per page.

The live short description, quoted exactly:

Defy the god of the dead as you hack and slash out of the Underworld in this rogue-like dungeon crawler from the creators of Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre.

There are four jobs done in one sentence, in the order a shopper needs them:

1. 01A verb and a stake. “Defy the god of the dead” is an action and an antagonist. Compare that to the most common opener in our sample, which is some variant of “Welcome to the world of X.”
2. 02The literal mechanic. “Hack and slash” is not a mood word. It tells you what your hands will be doing.
3. 03The genre, named. “Rogue-like dungeon crawler.” No coyness, no invented category.
4. 04Pedigree, last. “From the creators of Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre.”

Our analyzer produced a recommendation telling Supergiant to “leverage the Supergiant pedigree more prominently” and to consider adding “from the award-winning creators of” to the short description. On the live page that is already there, minus the word “award-winning.” This is the first place we would push back on our own output: the recommendation is not wrong so much as already satisfied, and the rubric appears to have wanted the studio name earlier in the sentence rather than at the end.

We think the end is the right place. Pedigree is a tiebreaker, not a hook. A shopper who does not recognise “Bastion” loses nothing by reading it last; a shopper who does recognise it gets a reason to click that arrives after they already know what the game is. Putting the studio first would spend the highest-value words in the sentence on a signal that only works for people who are already fans.

The issue, in full:

Small capsule lacks visual impact at thumbnail scale. Evidence: “Small capsule shows only 'HADES’ text on red background with minimal visual elements.” The small capsule (231x87) shows just the title and basic red background. When displayed as a ~292x136 thumbnail in wishlists and browse lists, it lacks the visual punch needed to stand out among competitors.

The fix it proposed: add a key character element, Zagreus with a weapon, or a mythological symbol alongside the title.

We downloaded the live capsule_231x87.jpg on July 26, 2026 to check. The evidence holds. The small capsule is the HADES wordmark in white with a red inner shadow, set over a painterly orange-and-red abstract wash. No figure, no weapon, no architecture. The estimated score gain the model attached to fixing it was +8.

Here is where the analyzer is applying a rule correctly and still, we think, reaching the wrong answer for this specific page.

The rule is sound in general. In our own tally of 98 Steam top-seller capsules, roughly a quarter were pure logotype on a flat background, and almost every one of those belonged to a franchise whose name does the selling. That is exactly the trap: the pattern looks copyable and is not. We wrote about it in the capsule art data post.

But Hades is in the group the pattern is licensed for, and the wordmark is doing more work than “text on a background” suggests. Three things:

• —The colour is the signal. That orange-red is not decoration. Scroll a Steam browse row and the Hades capsule is the only warm block in a sea of dark blues and greys. Contrast against the surrounding grid is a discovery mechanic in its own right, and it survives downscaling in a way that a small character silhouette does not.
• —A character at 231x87 is a smudge. The proposed fix, Zagreus with a weapon, has to fit alongside a six-letter title inside a strip that Steam then renders as small as 120x45 in dense list views. Our capsule validator exists precisely because that shrink kills detail. A hero figure at that size becomes noise beside the wordmark, and noise is worse than empty space.
• —The header capsule already does the character job. Steam does not show one capsule; it shows a family of them. The 460x215 header, the library art, and the page hero all carry Supergiant’s illustration. Loading the smallest asset with the same information is redundant.

The honest version of the disagreement: the analyzer scored the small capsule against a general rule, and for a game with Hades’ recognition the tradeoff runs the other way. If your game is not recognised, take the analyzer’s side, not ours.

The live About section runs five headed blocks in this order: BATTLE OUT OF HELL, UNLEASH THE FURY OF OLYMPUS, BEFRIEND GODS GHOSTS AND MONSTERS, BUILT FOR REPLAYABILITY, and NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE.

The analyzer’s recommendation was to move that last block up:

The “NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE” section brilliantly addresses roguelike intimidation but could be more prominent. Consider moving this messaging earlier in the description.

We agree with this one, and it is the most transferable note on the whole page. That block is the page’s answer to the single biggest objection a browsing shopper has to a roguelike: “I will die a lot and never see the end.” It says permanent upgrades let players who are not gods finish the story. That is objection handling, and objection handling placed fifth out of five is placed where scanners never reach.

Every genre has one dominant objection. For roguelikes it is difficulty. For factory games it is “will I understand this.” For narrative games it is “how long is it.” Find yours, answer it in one sentence, and put the sentence in the first screen of the About section instead of the last.

The info-level tag issue asked for “Fast-Paced” and “Character Customization” to be added, and suggested deprioritising “LGBTQ+” on the grounds that it “doesn’t drive purchase decisions.” A separate recommendation said to move “Action Roguelike” and “Hack and Slash” to the front and complained that “Story Rich” is buried.

We pulled the live tag order on July 26, 2026:

Action Roguelike, Roguelite, Hack and Slash, Indie, Mythology, Action, Roguelike, Singleplayer, Great Soundtrack, Story Rich, Dungeon Crawler, RPG, Replay Value, Isometric, Difficult, Hand-drawn, Action RPG, Atmospheric, Perma Death, LGBTQ+

Action Roguelike is already first. Hack and Slash is already third. LGBTQ+ is already twentieth, which is as deprioritised as a tag can be without being removed. Two of the three tag notes describe a page that does not exist.

The one that survives contact with the live list is Story Rich at position 10. Supergiant’s game is unusually story-heavy for its genre, and tag order feeds Steam’s recommendation weighting, so a differentiator sitting behind Singleplayer and Great Soundtrack is a real, if small, miss. If you want to sanity-check your own ordering against what actually gets searched in your genre, that is what the tag optimizer is for.

The wider lesson for reading any automated store page audit, including ours: treat tag-order advice as a hypothesis and check it against the live tag cloud before you act. Tag lists move. Reports do not.

Five techniques from this page that cost nothing but attention:

1. 01Write the short description as verb, stake, mechanic, genre. Hades does all four inside 155 characters. Most pages in our sample spend 232 characters and land only the genre. The short description guide has the sentence patterns.
2. 02Name your genre in plain words. “Rogue-like dungeon crawler” beats any invented category, because shoppers filter by genre before they evaluate anything else.
3. 03Answer the genre’s dominant objection in the first screen of the About section, not the last. This is the single highest-leverage edit available to most pages and it takes an afternoon.
4. 04Pick a capsule colour that fights the grid, not just the game. Steam shows your art beside a dozen competitors. Warm against a cold row is a real advantage before any detail is legible.
5. 05Do not copy the text-only capsule. Hades earns it with brand recognition you do not have. If your game is unknown, the art has to carry the genre signal and the text has to carry the name.

For the other end of the same spectrum, see our teardown of Balatro’s page, which scored 77 with a description subscore of 66 and sold enormously anyway, and the Hollow Knight and Silksong comparison, where the same studio’s two pages score very differently on capsule.

You can run your own page through the same rubric on the homepage, or browse where other pages landed on the leaderboard.