Steam Short Description: Rules, Examples, and Templates

The Steam short description is a plain-text field capped at 300 characters that renders at the top of your store page, in your Google search snippet, and in every Discord or social link embed of your page. Its job is to name your genre and sell the fantasy in one glance; the long “About This Game” section below it has a different job for a different reader.

That’s the answer. The rest of this guide is the working detail: where the 300-character figure actually comes from (the docs are vaguer than you’d think), a formula that reliably produces a good one, 10 real short descriptions pulled from live pages with a one-line verdict each, fill-in templates by genre, and a direct answer to the short vs long description question. For the long description itself, the companion piece is our Steam description writing guide.

Here’s an honesty note most guides skip. The official Steamworks documentation never prints a number — it says the short description is “limited to a few hundred characters.” The 300 figure comes from the character counter in the Steamworks partner editor itself, and it has been community-documented and stable for years. Treat 300 as the hard cap.

The docs are explicit about format, though: the field is plain text only. Extra line breaks, bullet points, and BBCode will not render. Whatever you write comes out as one unbroken paragraph, so write it as one.

Two more rules straight from the same doc page:

• —No time-based text. “Now Available!” or “Coming March 2027” will be stale the moment you stop maintaining it, and Valve tells you not to put it there.
• —Save the details. Feature lists and edition breakdowns belong in the long description, not here.

And since September 2024, harder rules apply. Valve’s announcement on written descriptions banned links to external websites, embeds that mimic Steam’s own UI, and links or embeds pointing at other games — and the short description field is explicitly on the list of sections covered, alongside About The Game, Special Announcement, and Awards. Valve’s stated reason: too many store pages had become advertisements for other store pages, some listing several other games before describing the game you clicked on. The same restrictions now appear in the Steamworks store page docs.

One practical ceiling below the hard cap: if you plan to localize your store page, aim for 200-250 characters in English. German and Russian translations run long, and a 295-character English description leaves your translators nowhere to go.

I verified each of these in early July 2026 by pulling live store pages and their HTML.

That third row is the one developers underrate. Check the page source of any Steam store page: the og:description and meta description tags contain the short description word for word. When a streamer’s community drops your Steam link in Discord, the embed shows your capsule, your name, and your short description. Nothing else. It is your pitch in every context where you are not in the room.

Which also means the short description is the only store page text that gets read off Steam. Your screenshots and trailer don’t follow the link into a Discord embed. The 300 characters do.

This is the question that brings most people to this page, so here is the direct version: the short description is for people deciding whether to pay attention, and the long description is for people deciding whether to buy.

The mistake I see most on pages run through the Steam Page Analyzer is writing the same kind of copy in both fields: either two doses of lore poetry or two doses of feature bullets. They should barely overlap. Chris Zukowski’s 3-step framework for describing your game to strangers makes the point that shoppers need to know what you do in the game — verbs are gameplay, nouns are lore — and nowhere does that matter more than in the 300-character field, because it may be the only text a shopper ever reads.

If your long description needs work too, that’s a separate craft with its own rules (formatting, image breaks, feature ordering), covered in the description writing guide.

Almost every strong short description on Steam is some arrangement of three parts:

1. 01Genre, in the shopper’s words. Not your elevator-pitch hybrid (“a narrative-driven tactical experience”) but the shelf label a fan would use: roguelike deckbuilder, co-op horror, city builder, metroidvania. This is the same vocabulary exercise as picking your Steam tags, and the genre word should appear in the first sentence.
2. 02Hook: the one thing only your game does. The mechanic or premise a player would repeat to a friend. Poker hands as your combat system. Dwarves mining in fully destructible caves. Selling scrap to a company that does not care if you live.
3. 03Fantasy: who the player gets to be. Written in second person or as a command. “Be the bullet hell.” “Turn overgrown fields into a thriving home.”

Order is flexible. Balatro leads with genre in three words. Vampire Survivors leads with a command verb and lands the fantasy last. What doesn’t work is skipping part 1: a short description with no genre signal forces the shopper to reverse-engineer what kind of game this is from adjectives, and shoppers don’t do homework.

All 10 pulled from live Steam pages via the storefront API on July 2, 2026, quoted verbatim with character counts. First, the spread of lengths, because the range surprises people:

Nobody in this sample uses all 300 characters, and two massive hits use under 100. Length is a budget, not a target.

Balatro (187 chars): “The poker roguelike. Balatro is a hypnotically satisfying deckbuilder where you play illegal poker hands, discover game-changing jokers, and trigger adrenaline-pumping, outrageous combos.” Verdict: the first three words do more work than most full descriptions; genre, hook, and tone in one clause.

Lethal Company (80 chars): “A co-op horror about scavenging at abandoned moons to sell scrap to the Company.” Verdict: genre, loop, and premise in a single sentence; proof that 80 characters can carry a game sitting at 500,000+ reviews, Overwhelmingly Positive, as of July 2026.

Deep Rock Galactic (235 chars): “Deep Rock Galactic is a 1-4 player co-op FPS featuring dwarven space miners, procedurally-generated destructible environments, and endless hordes of alien monsters. Explore cave systems, mine for minerals, and work together to survive!” Verdict: player count up front, three nouns no other game owns, then verbs; textbook.

Stardew Valley (240 chars): “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?” Verdict: pure second-person fantasy with zero genre nouns; it works here because the screenshots scream farming sim, but it’s a risky pattern to copy.

Vampire Survivors (266 chars): “Mow down thousands of night creatures and survive until dawn!” then a genre sentence, closing with “Be the bullet hell!” Verdict: opens on a command verb and ends on a four-word fantasy; the muddled middle (“gothic horror casual game with rogue-lite elements”) shows even hits struggle to name a new genre.

Hades II (151 chars): “Battle beyond the Underworld using dark sorcery to take on the Titan of Time in this bewitching sequel to the award-winning rogue-like dungeon crawler.” Verdict: leans hard on pedigree; “sequel to the award-winning” is a hook you only get to use once.

Hollow Knight (232 chars): “Forge your own path in Hollow Knight! An epic action adventure through a vast ruined kingdom of insects and heroes. Explore twisting caverns, battle tainted creatures and befriend bizarre bugs, all in a classic, hand-drawn 2D style.” Verdict: “epic action adventure” is weak genre signal, but the concrete verbs and “hand-drawn 2D” rescue it.

HELLDIVERS 2 (170 chars): “The Galaxy’s Last Line of Offence. Enlist in the Helldivers and join the fight for freedom across a hostile galaxy in a fast, frantic, and ferocious third-person shooter.” Verdict: tagline first, genre buried at the end; a luxury move that works with a marketing budget behind it, not before.

Black Myth: Wukong (235 chars): “Black Myth: Wukong is an action RPG rooted in Chinese mythology.” Then: “to uncover the obscured truth beneath the veil of a glorious legend from the past.” Verdict: strong first sentence, then 100+ characters of lore fog that name nothing you do.

No Players Online (73 chars): “you find an abandoned fps game on an old computer. you decide to play it.” Verdict: no genre, no verbs, lowercase on purpose; a dare instead of a pitch. Fits a tiny experimental horror release perfectly and would sink a $20 game.

The pattern across all ten: the strong ones commit to a genre noun early and spend the rest on one specific hook. The weak stretches are always the same failure — abstract lore where a verb should be.

Use these as scaffolding, not final copy. Fill the blanks, then cut every word that survives on momentum alone.

Three notes on using them:

• —The bracketed slots force specificity. If you can’t fill “[what hunts you]” with something better than “monsters,” the description isn’t the problem.
• —Genre word placement matters more than the template. Front-load it; shoppers filter by shelf label before they read anything else.
• —Test the result at 160 characters too, because that’s roughly what Google shows before truncating your snippet. Your first sentence should survive amputation.

From running store pages through the analyzer and reading a few hundred coming-soon pages, these are the recurring ways the field gets wasted:

• —Lore openings. “For a thousand years, the kingdom of Vareth has slumbered...” names no genre and no gameplay. Nobody has heard of Vareth. Start with what the player does.
• —Adjective stacking as genre. “A breathtaking, emotional journey” tells a shopper nothing they can filter on. One genre noun beats five adjectives.
• —Feature-list cramming. “40+ weapons, 12 classes, 6 biomes, crafting, fishing, pets” is long description material. In the short field it reads as noise, and it duplicates work your About This Game section does better with formatting and images.
• —Repeating the capsule. If your capsule art already says “cute farming game,” the short description should add information, not caption the image.
• —Time-sensitive text. Steamworks tells you directly: no “Now Available,” no dates. The field renders in embeds for years.
• —Writing it last, at 2am, before the page goes live. The short description travels further than any other text on your page. It deserves more than the leftover energy after the trailer upload. Our store page checklist sequences this work so the copy gets real drafts.

Run your draft against this list. It takes two minutes.

1. 01Genre noun in the first sentence? A fan of your genre should recognize their shelf within one glance.
2. 02One hook only your game can claim? Paste-test it: if the sentence works on a competitor’s page, rewrite it.
3. 03Under 250 characters? You get localization headroom and a Google snippet that survives truncation at ~160.
4. 04Zero formatting, zero links, zero dates? Plain text renders; everything else breaks or violates the September 2024 rules.
5. 05Read it inside a fake Discord embed. Put the text under your capsule image and game name, nothing else. That’s how thousands of people will meet your game. Does it earn a click?

Then check the field in context: run your page through the free Steam Page Analyzer to see how the short description reads alongside your capsule, tags, and screenshots, and work through the interactive store page checklist before launch day. The 300 characters are the most portable text you’ll ever write for your game. Write them like they’re traveling without you, because they are.