Steam Capsule Sizes 2026: 920x430, 462x174 + Every Dimension

The five core Steam capsule sizes in 2026: header capsule 920x430, small capsule 462x174, main capsule 1232x706, vertical capsule 748x896, and library capsule 600x900. Those are the exact upload dimensions the Steamworks form asks for today. If you have seen half those numbers quoted somewhere ( 460x215, 231x87, 616x353, 374x448 ), those are the older sizes Valve retired in its August 2024 asset update, which is why almost every forum thread on this topic shows two competing sets of numbers. The master table below covers every remaining slot, and the rest of this guide handles aspect ratios, file formats, size limits, text rules, and the rejection traps that cost 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 dimensions. At about ten seconds per image, it is cheaper than a 3-5 business day Steamworks rejection.

These dimensions come from the official Steamworks store asset documentation and the library assets documentation, re-checked against the live docs in 2026. Every store capsule below reflects the larger sizes Valve moved to in August 2024; the earlier ( now retired ) sizes are covered in the two-sets-of-numbers section further down.

Bundles add one extra slot: a bundle header at 707x232, shown at the top of the bundle detail page. And the library and community assets:

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

Knowing the pixel count is half the job. The context each capsule renders in tells you how to spend your art budget, so here is each slot in one citable line, then what it means for you.

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

The Steam header capsule is 920x430 pixels and appears at the top of your store page, in Big Picture mode, and in “Recommended for you” widgets. It is the one everybody designs first because it anchors the store page. The library header reuses the same 920x430 frame, so a single composition covers both.

The Steam main capsule is 1232x706 pixels and appears only when Steam actively features your game — the front-page carousel, sale event spotlights, “New and Trending.” Low frequency, highest stakes. When this slot fires, you are being shown to more people in an hour than your page normally sees in a week.

The Steam vertical capsule is 748x896 pixels and appears on seasonal sale front pages and some promotional layouts. If your game looks cropped and awkward during the Summer Sale, it is because header art got letterboxed into this ~5:6 portrait frame instead of being composed for it.

The Steam library capsule is 600x900 pixels and appears in the client library grid, where Steam auto-generates a 300x450 version. Library art is post-purchase real estate. It does not drive sales directly, but a half-finished capsule sitting next to AAA neighbors quietly tells a buyer they bought a cheap game, and players do browse each other’s libraries.

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 gets rejected.
• —App icon: JPG only, no transparency. Alpha channels flatten 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 does not 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 will not 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 is 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

There is one narrow exception. Text describing a major update, a seasonal event, a battle pass, or new DLC is allowed only if you upload it as a temporary Artwork Override ( capped at one month ) and localize it into every language your game supports. The base capsule stays clean; the promo art is a separate, time-boxed upload.

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 a reviewer can not read your name at 231x87, you are redoing it.
• —Compression artifacts. Heavily compressed JPGs read as low effort and get flagged.
• —Missing library assets. All 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 August 2024, Valve doubled the upload dimensions for the store capsules to serve sharper art on high-resolution monitors and the Steam Deck OLED screen, as reported by Game Developer. The header capsule went from 460x215 to 920x430, the small capsule from 231x87 to 462x174, the main capsule from 616x353 to 1232x706, the vertical capsule from 374x448 to 748x896, and the library header from 460x215 to 920x430. The aspect ratios did not move; the pixel counts doubled. Valve accepted the old sizes until November 1, 2024, then stopped.

Two things did not double. The library capsule ( 600x900 ) and the library hero ( 3840x1240 ) were already large from the 2019 library update, so they kept their existing sizes through the change.

Steam still lays most placements out at the old @1x sizes on standard-resolution screens, then serves the full-resolution image to high-DPI displays and the Deck. The small capsule alone spawns 184x69 and 120x45 derivatives on top of that. So both sets of numbers are “correct” in a sense — one is what you upload, the other is roughly the layout size on a normal monitor. Guides written before August 2024, and plenty of templates, still quote the halved numbers as the spec, which is where most of the confusion in search results comes from.

The practical workflow: build each composition at the upload size or larger, then eyeball every image at half size and below. Your art gets judged at 460 pixels wide and your search presence at 120. If the design only works at upload resolution, it does not work.

These are the rules the dimensions themselves impose; the longer craft version is the capsule design guide.

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 are 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 working area between slots varies enormously, and it should change how much detail you paint into each:

The library hero gives you roughly 60 times the canvas of the small capsule. Painting the same level of detail into both wastes effort at one end and turns to 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 get cut on someone’s monitor.

Then test, do not guess. Once your capsules clear the technical checks, the open question is which composition converts, and that is measurable. Our guide to Steam page A/B testing covers how to run capsule experiments through Valve’s own tooling.

If you are updating an older game or working from a stale capsule guide, here is the change history that matters:

• —September 2022: the strict text rules took effect. Base capsules dropped to artwork, game name, and subtitle only. Anything you read from before this date about splashing review scores on a capsule is out of date.
• —August 2024: the big dimension change. Upload sizes doubled across the four store capsules and the library header, and Valve stopped accepting the old sizes on November 1, 2024. Any guide written before this quotes the halved numbers as the spec.
• —January 2024: Valve added AI-content disclosure to the content survey. AI-generated player-facing assets ( capsule art included ) get disclosed on your store page.
• —January 2026: Valve rewrote the AI-disclosure rules, clarifying that AI used purely 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 since the August 2024 refresh. Every pixel value in this post matches the current Steamworks documentation, and there is no public signal of another change 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 is 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, fine detail does not.

Visibly hand-made art as a signal. Since AI disclosures became prominent on store pages, deliberately painterly, imperfect, obviously-human capsule art has turned into 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 is the Steam small capsule size?

The small capsule is 462x174 pixels at upload and appears in search results, top-seller lists, new releases, and wishlists. Steam auto-generates smaller 184x69 and 120x45 versions from it, so your title has to stay readable at 120 pixels wide. It is the highest-traffic capsule on Steam. Check yours with the capsule validator.

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 is your highest-stakes asset rather than your highest-traffic one.

What is the Steam header capsule size?

920x430 pixels at upload, shown 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, and that is 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; 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 built for these exact slots: readable at 120 pixels, composed for multiple aspect ratios, compliant with Valve’s text rules. It has 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 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.

Ready to put these dimensions to work? Run 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.