Steam Capsule Sizes 2026: Every Dimension, Format, and Rule

The five core Steam capsule sizes in 2026: header capsule 920x430, small capsule 462x174, main capsule 1232x706, vertical capsule 748x896, library capsule 600x900. Those are the upload dimensions Steamworks asks for today; most slots actually display at half that size (460x215, 231x87, 616x353, 374x448), which is why you’ll find two sets of numbers in every forum thread on the subject. If that’s all you came for, you’re done in one paragraph. The master table below covers every remaining slot, and the rest of this guide covers aspect ratios, file formats, size limits, text rules, and the rejection traps that cost developers a review cycle.

Before you read further: drop your finished art into our free capsule validator. It detects which capsule slot an image belongs to from its aspect ratio, then checks the file format and size. It’s the tool people find when they search for a “Steam capsule analyzer,” and at about ten seconds per image, it’s cheaper than a 3-5 business day Steamworks rejection.

These steam capsule art dimensions come from the official Steamworks store asset documentation, checked against the live docs in June 2026. The “displays at” column is the size most players actually see; the upload column is what the Steamworks form expects since the 2022 asset refresh (more on that split in the @1x vs @2x section below).

And the library and community assets, from the library assets documentation:

Trading card art, achievement icons, and emoticons have their own specs and are optional; the full inventory with checklists lives in our Steam page asset requirements guide.

Knowing the dimensions is half the job; the context each capsule image size renders in tells you how to spend your art budget.

Small capsule (462x174): the workhorse. Search results, top-seller lists, new releases, wishlist rows — the highest-traffic placements on Steam all use this slot, and they often render it at the auto-generated 120x45 size. If your title is unreadable at 120 pixels wide, you are invisible in search. This is the capsule to obsess over first, and it’s the one our CTR benchmarks data says most developers under-invest in.

Header capsule (920x430): the one everybody designs first because it sits at the top of the store page. It also serves Big Picture mode and “Recommended for you” widgets, and the library header reuses the same 920x430 frame.

Main capsule (1232x706): only appears when Steam features you — front-page carousel, sale event spotlights, “New and Trending.” Low frequency, highest stakes. When this slot fires, you’re being shown to more people in an hour than your page normally sees in a week.

Vertical capsule (748x896): built for seasonal sale pages. If your game looks cropped and awkward during the Summer Sale, it’s because header art got letterboxed into this ~5:6 portrait frame instead of being composed for it.

Library assets: post-purchase real estate. They don’t drive sales directly, but a half-finished library capsule next to AAA neighbors quietly tells your buyer they bought a cheap game. Players browse each other’s libraries; this is word-of-mouth surface area.

For the design principles behind each slot — composition, typography, color reads at distance — our Steam capsule design guide goes deep. This post stays on specs.

The format rules are short and mostly unforgiving:

• —Store capsules (header, small, main, vertical): PNG or JPG. PNG is the safe default; it keeps text edges clean, which matters because every capsule carries your logo.
• —Library logo: PNG with a transparent background, no exceptions. A logo sitting on a white box will be rejected.
• —App icon: JPG only, no transparency support. Alpha channels get flattened to solid black, so a dark logo can disappear into its own background.
• —Screenshots: PNG or JPG, 16:9, 1920x1080 minimum, at least 5 of them. Mark at least 4 as suitable for all ages, or Steam pulls them from some placements (the front-page hover preview, for one). Screenshots have their own trap list — see the Steam screenshot guide and run files through the screenshot checker before upload.
• —File size: Valve doesn’t publish one universal byte limit for capsules, but bloated files are pointless at these dimensions. Our capsule validator flags anything over 2MB, and no properly exported capsule should get anywhere near that. A clean 920x430 PNG lands around 300-800KB.

Export in RGB. Capsules exported from print-oriented CMYK workflows shift colors on upload, and you won’t notice until the page is live.

Since September 1, 2022, Valve’s graphical asset rules allow exactly three things on a base capsule: your game’s artwork, your game’s name, and an official subtitle. That’s the whole list.

Explicitly banned on standard capsules:

• —Review scores and quotes, from Steam or anywhere else
• —Award names, symbols, or logos — yes, even the ones you legitimately won
• —Discount messaging (“On sale now,” “-20%,” launch-discount text)
• —Cross-promotion of your other games or a sequel
• —Miscellaneous marketing text of any kind

Two more rules catch people off guard. Any text on a capsule must be localized into at least the languages your game supports — an English-only capsule on a page that lists eleven supported languages is a violation. And the library hero cannot contain any text at all; the logo overlay exists precisely so Valve can keep that image clean.

Violations cost more than a failed review. Valve states that non-compliant pages face reduced store visibility and ineligibility for official sale and event featuring. You can be quietly excluded from the Summer Sale page and never know why.

Beyond the text rules, the rejection reasons I see most often are mundane:

• —Wrong dimensions. Steamworks expects exact pixel counts; even 1-2 pixels off gets the file bounced, and every re-review cycle costs 3-5 business days.
• —Illegible title at small sizes. If reviewers can’t read your name at 231x87, you’re redoing it.
• —Compression artifacts. Heavily compressed JPGs read as low effort and get flagged.
• —Missing library assets. All four library assets are listed as required in the current docs; pages stall in review without them.

Want the technical half checked automatically? The analyzer below reads your page and flags asset problems alongside everything else.

In mid-2022, Valve doubled the upload dimensions for every store capsule to support high-DPI displays. The header capsule went from 460x215 to 920x430, the small capsule from 231x87 to 462x174, the main capsule from 616x353 to 1232x706, and the vertical capsule from 374x448 to 748x896. The aspect ratios didn’t move; the pixel counts doubled.

The store still renders most placements at the original @1x sizes on standard displays, and Steam auto-generates the smaller derivatives (the small capsule alone spawns 184x69 and 120x45 versions). So both sets of numbers are “correct” — one is what you upload, the other is what most players see. Guides written before 2022, and plenty of tools, still quote the @1x numbers as the steam capsule dimensions, which is where most of the confusion in search results comes from.

The practical workflow: build each composition at @2x or larger, export at the upload size, then eyeball every image at @1x and below. Your art will be judged at 460 pixels wide and your search presence at 120. If the design only works at upload resolution, it doesn’t work.

This is the capsule art best practices section, compressed. The long version is the capsule design guide; these are the rules the dimensions themselves impose.

Design for the smallest render first. The 120x45 derivative of your small capsule decides whether your title survives Steam search. Start there and scale up, not the other way around. Thin fonts, outlined text, and busy backgrounds all die at 120 pixels.

One composition per aspect ratio. You’re producing for ~2.66:1, ~2.14:1, ~1.75:1, ~5:6, 2:3, and ~3.1:1. No single image crops cleanly into all six. Plan a landscape composition, a portrait composition, and an ultra-wide hero treatment from day one — retrofitting a portrait crop later is how bad vertical capsules happen.

Respect the canvas gap. The difference in working area between slots is enormous, and it should change how much detail you put in each:

The library hero gives you roughly 60 times the canvas of the small capsule. Painting the same level of detail into both is a waste at one end and unreadable mush at the other.

Stay inside the hero safe area. The library hero crops aggressively at different window widths; Valve guarantees only the 860x380 center region survives. Faces, logos, and focal elements outside that band will get cut on someone’s monitor.

Then test, don’t guess. Once your capsules pass the technical checks, the question becomes which composition converts — and that’s measurable. Our guide to Steam page A/B testing covers how to run capsule experiments through Valve’s own tooling.

If you’re updating an older game or working from a stale steam capsule guide, here’s the change history that matters:

• —September 2022: the big one. Upload dimensions doubled across all store capsules, and the strict text rules above took effect. Anything written before this date quotes @1x sizes as the upload spec.
• —January 2024: Valve added mandatory AI disclosure to the content survey. If your capsule art (or any player-facing asset) was AI-generated, that fact is disclosed on your store page.
• —January 2026: Valve rewrote the AI disclosure rules, clarifying that AI used as a development tool is exempt while AI-generated player-facing content still must be disclosed, as reported by Game Developer.
• —Dimensions in 2026: unchanged. Every pixel value in this post matches the Steamworks documentation as of June 2026. The last dimension change was the 2022 refresh, and there is no public signal of another one coming.

Caveat first: this is pattern-reading from this year’s sale pages and top-seller lists, not a measured dataset. With that said, three patterns are hard to miss in 2026.

Character-forward close-ups keep winning. Chris Zukowski documented the trends in Steam capsule art years ago — a single focal character, strong silhouette, emotion readable at thumbnail size — and his follow-up on capsule design trends holds up in 2026 better than most advice from that era. Browse today’s top sellers and count how many capsules are one character, chest-up, looking at or past the camera. It’s most of them.

Flat, oversized logotypes. Detailed painterly backgrounds keep losing ground to simpler scenes with a logo that takes 30-40% of the frame. The 120x45 search render explains why: typography survives downscaling, detail doesn’t.

Visibly hand-made art as a signal. Since AI disclosures became prominent on store pages, deliberately painterly, imperfect, obviously-human capsule art has become a positioning choice. Commissioning a dedicated capsule artist — an illustrator who specializes in exactly these formats — has gone from a luxury to a normal line item in indie marketing budgets.

Trends are seasoning, though. Legibility at 120 pixels and compliance with the text rules outrank all three.

What size is the Steam main capsule?

The main capsule is 1232x706 pixels at upload and displays at 616x353 in the front-page carousel and sale features. It only appears when Steam actively features your game, so it’s your highest-stakes asset rather than your highest-traffic one. Check yours in seconds with the capsule validator.

What is the Steam header capsule size?

920x430 pixels at upload, displayed at 460x215 at the top of your store page, in Big Picture mode, and in recommendation widgets. The library header uses the same 920x430 dimensions, so one composition covers both slots. The complete asset inventory is in our Steam page asset requirements guide.

What aspect ratio are Steam capsules?

There is no single steam capsule aspect ratio — that’s the trap. The header is ~2.14:1, the small capsule ~2.66:1, the main capsule ~1.75:1, the vertical capsule ~5:6, the library capsule 2:3, and the library hero ~3.1:1. You need at least three distinct compositions to cover them well; the capsule design guide shows how to adapt one key art piece across all of them.

What does “capsule art” mean, and what is a capsule artist?

Capsule is Valve’s term for the thumbnail images that represent your game across the Steam store — the word covers the header, small, main, vertical, and library variants collectively. A capsule artist is an illustrator who specializes in key art designed for these exact slots: readable at 120 pixels, composed for multiple aspect ratios, compliant with Valve’s text rules. It’s become a recognized specialty in indie game marketing.

Where can I find header, main, small, and vertical capsule examples?

Steam itself is the best gallery: search results show small capsules, any game’s store page shows its header capsule, the front-page carousel shows main capsules, and seasonal sale pages show vertical capsules. For curated examples with scores attached, browse our examples library and the Steam page leaderboard to see how highly-rated pages handle each slot.

Ready to put these dimensions to work? Start by running every finished image through the free capsule validator — it catches dimension, format, and file-size problems in about ten seconds per file, before Valve’s review queue does it over 3-5 business days.

Then go one level up: capsules are one input among many, and the free Steam page analyzer grades your whole store page — capsules, screenshots, description, tags — and tells you which fixes will actually move your conversion rate.