Stardew Valley launched in February 2016 and its store page still scores 80 out of 100 in our analyzer, thirteen points above the median of the 373 pages in our sample. It does that while breaking a rule every store page guide repeats: the 240-character short description never names the genre. Not “farming,” not “simulation,” not “RPG.” It describes a situation and asks a question, and the entire genre signal is carried by the tag list underneath it.
That works here. It is also the single most dangerous thing on the page to copy, and most of this teardown is about why.
The framing, as always: these are our product’s rubric scores measuring how a page is built. Not a Valve metric, not a sales prediction, and the sample is pages people chose to run through the free tool. The page was analyzed on July 24, 2026, which makes this the freshest report in the series, and we re-verified every claim against Steam’s live data on July 26, 2026.
The scores our analyzer gave the Stardew Valley page
| Element | Stardew Valley | Median of 373 pages |
|---|---|---|
| Overall | 80 | 67 |
| Capsule | 78 | 72 |
| Description | 80 | 64 |
| Screenshots | 83 | 75 |
| Tags | 78 | 62 |
The page carries 16 screenshots and 1 trailer, a 240-character short description, a 4,472-character About section, and 12 supported languages. Steam listed it at $14.99 with a Metacritic score of 89 and an Overwhelmingly Positive review summary across roughly 391,000 reviews when we checked.
What stands out is how flat that profile is. Nothing on this page is exceptional. Four subscores between 78 and 83, and an overall of 80. Most pages that score in the eighties do it by being outstanding at one thing and adequate elsewhere. This one has no weak element at all.
A 240-character short description that never names the genre
Quoted exactly from Steam’s live data:
You’ve inherited your grandfather’s old farm plot in Stardew Valley. Armed with hand-me-down tools and a few coins, you set out to begin your new life. Can you learn to live off the land and turn these overgrown fields into a thriving home?
The analyzer flagged it: “Short description is generic narrative setup without a differentiation hook.”
We half agree. “Generic” is the wrong word for it. Three things in there are doing real work:
- “Hand-me-down tools and a few coins” is a specific, tactile image that sets the starting condition of the game. It tells you that you begin with nothing, which is the entire premise of the progression loop.
- The second person, in the past perfect. “You’ve inherited” places the reader inside the fiction before the sentence has asked for anything.
- It ends on a question. “Can you learn to live off the land” is a soft challenge, and challenges are one of the few closing moves that keep a skimmer reading into the About section.
What it does not do is name a genre, name a mechanic, or state a single number. A shopper who has never heard of the game finishes those 240 characters knowing the setup and not knowing what they would be doing with their hands. Compare the Hades short description, which gets a verb, a stake, a mechanic and a genre into 155 characters.
Stardew gets away with it because the tag cloud sitting a few hundred pixels below reads Farming Sim, Pixel Graphics, Multiplayer, Life Sim, RPG. The genre is stated, just not by the copy. If you write a short description that sells a feeling instead of a genre, the tag list has to carry the genre or nothing does. That is a defensible split for a game people arrive at by name. It is a bad bet for a game nobody is searching for yet, because the tag list only helps shoppers who already found the page.
Sixteen screenshots and one trailer: the inverted media split
The sample median is 9 screenshots and 1 trailer. Stardew runs 16 and 1. Palworld, at the other extreme, ran 29 and 9 in March 2026 and cut it to 17 and 3 by July, which we go through in the Palworld teardown.
Sixteen stills against one video is unusual and, for this game, correct. Stardew is a game of small readable states: a field at a given season, an inventory, a festival, a mine floor. A still frame communicates almost everything a video would, because the interesting information is spatial rather than temporal. Games whose appeal is motion, timing or spectacle invert this and need the video.
The analyzer still found two real gaps in the gallery. The first is a warning that no screenshot covers UI and inventory, character creation, or the relationship and marriage scenes. That last one matters most: romance is one of the most-discussed features of this game and one of its biggest differentiators against other farming sims, and it is invisible in the images. The second is an info note that the screenshots carry no captions. Steam lets you attach a caption to every screenshot and almost nobody does; on a page whose images are dense with readable UI, a one-line caption converts a confusing frame into an explanatory one for free.
The general rule: the features people talk about in your community should appear in your gallery. If a mechanic generates conversation and is not visible in any image, it is not selling anything to a stranger. Order and first-frame legibility are what the screenshot checker tests.
The duplicate tag warning we think is wrong
This is the page’s only warning-severity tag issue, and it carried an estimated +6:
Duplicate and redundant tag entries waste valuable tag slots. Evidence: Tag list contains: “Singleplayer” ... “Single-player”, “Multiplayer” ... “Multi-player”, “Co-op”, “Online Co-op”, “LAN Co-op”, “Shared/Split Screen Co-op”, “Shared/Split Screen”
We pulled Steam’s live data on July 26, 2026 to check, and the warning does not hold up.
The user tag cloud, in order, is:
Farming Sim, Pixel Graphics, Multiplayer, Life Sim, RPG, Relaxing, Simulation, Agriculture, Crafting, Indie, Sandbox, Building, Casual, Open World, Singleplayer, 2D, Dating Sim, Cute, Great Soundtrack, Fishing
Twenty tags, no duplicates. “Multiplayer” appears once, at position three. “Singleplayer” appears once, at position fifteen.
The strings the report quoted — Single-player, Multi-player, Co-op, Online Co-op, LAN Co-op, Shared/Split Screen Co-op, Shared/Split Screen — are all in Steam’s Features box, which is a different list in a different part of the page. Features are declared by the developer in Steamworks and describe platform capabilities. Community tags are applied by players and drive discovery. They look similar in a scrape and they do completely different jobs.
We are publishing our own tool’s error because the practical advice matters more than the embarrassment. No automated audit can see your tag cloud as reliably as you can, because Steam does not expose it in the same API that serves everything else on the page. Before you delete anything on the strength of a duplicate-tag warning, open your own page and look at the two lists. We found the same conflation on the Silksong report and on the Balatro report, so it is a repeatable quirk rather than a one-off.
And to be explicit about the consequence: acting on this warning would have meant removing LAN Co-op or Shared/Split Screen from the Features box. Those are the declarations that put the game in Steam’s couch co-op and local multiplayer filters. Deleting them would cost real discovery to fix an imaginary problem.
What the tag list is actually leaving on the table
The info-level tag note is the one worth acting on: the list is missing “Story Rich” and “Character Customization.”
Look at the live twenty again. Four of the twenty slots go to tags that describe presentation rather than content or mechanics: Pixel Graphics, 2D, Cute, Relaxing. Another two are near-synonyms of tags already present: Simulation alongside Farming Sim and Life Sim, Agriculture alongside Farming Sim.
Meanwhile the game’s marriage system, its twelve romanceable characters, its character creator and its heavily story-driven community centre arc are represented by exactly one tag, Dating Sim, at position seventeen. “Story Rich” is one of the highest-traffic discovery tags on Steam and it is absent from a page whose narrative content is a major reason people play it.
The correction is not to strip the presentation tags — Pixel Graphics is a genuine filter for this audience — but the near-synonyms are cheap trades. The tag optimizer is the fast way to test which variant of an overlapping pair actually carries search volume in your genre.
Wooden letters that still work at 231x87
We downloaded the live capsule_231x87.jpg on July 26, 2026. It is the STARDEW VALLEY wordmark in chunky wooden letters, stacked over two lines, sitting on a pixel-art landscape of green hills, blue sky and clouds.
The analyzer’s info note was that the logo dominates the space and leaves little room for visual storytelling at thumbnail size. Technically true, and we would rate it lower than the model did as a problem.
Three things this capsule gets right that survive being shrunk to 120x45:
- The letters are objects, not type. Wooden planks with visible grain read as a texture rather than a font, which means the capsule still communicates “rural, handmade, warm” even when the individual letters stop being legible.
- It is bright in a dark row. Sky blue and grass green against a browse row where 44 of 98 top-seller capsules sit on dark backgrounds, by our own capsule tally. Same advantage Silksong has over Hollow Knight.
- Two-line stacking buys letter height. Splitting a fourteen-character title across two lines makes each character roughly twice as tall as it would be on one line. That is the cheapest legibility trick in capsule design and almost nobody uses it.
Test your own at the sizes Steam actually renders with the capsule validator.
The About section never mentions its own reception
The last info note is one we would act on today, and it is the same note that appeared on the Balatro report: the description text never mentions critical acclaim or sales.
Steam does show a review summary in the right rail. But a line inside the About section, in your own words, near the top, is different: it is voluntary, it is quotable, and it is the one place you can put a specific number that Steam will not put there for you. This page has a Metacritic score of 89 and one of the highest positive review percentages on the platform, and mentions neither.
The related note about buried features is worth pairing with it: the report flagged that marriage and eight-player co-op sit mid-list in the feature bullets rather than near the top. Eight-player co-op in particular is a purchase trigger for an entire audience segment that would otherwise assume this is a solo game, and it is below the fold.
What to copy from a page that has barely changed since 2016
- Stack your capsule title across two lines. Double the letter height for free, which is the difference between legible and illegible at 120x45.
- Make your capsule letters out of something. Wood, metal, stone, plants. Texture survives downscaling when typography does not.
- If your copy sells a feeling, make sure your tags sell the genre. One of the two has to be literal. Stardew chose copy for feeling and tags for genre, and that only works when people already know your name.
- Put the community’s favourite feature in the gallery. If people talk about it constantly and no screenshot shows it, it is selling nothing to strangers.
- Write screenshot captions. Steam supports them, almost nobody uses them, and they cost one line each.
- Do not delete anything from your Features box on the advice of an automated report. Check the tag cloud with your own eyes first. Features and tags are different lists.
- Say your own numbers in your own copy. A review count or a Metacritic line inside the About section is free conversion work that most pages never place.
Continue with the Hades teardown at 87, the highest in the sample, or see what a low-scoring page looks like in our breakdown of the 25 worst pages we analyzed. Run your own page on the homepage or browse the leaderboard.