Say the genre in the first six words
A reader who cannot place the game in a category by word six will not reach the second sentence. "A slow single-player game about keeping a lighthouse lit" does it in eleven; that is about the ceiling.
Pro edition
Store Page Kit.
The demo is a landing page that does its job. This is the material behind it: the assets a storefront actually asks for, what the first two lines have to accomplish, the eight seconds of trailer that decide everything, and the arithmetic that turns wishlists into a launch-day number.
Capsules, and the test for each
| Asset | Size | Its job | The test |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small capsule | 462 × 174 | Search results and lists. Seen at about a third of that width. | Shrink it to 150 px wide. If the title is unreadable, the title is too small — not the image. |
| Header capsule | 920 × 430 | The top of your own page and most curation. The one people mean by "the key art". | Cover the logo. Can somebody tell what kind of game it is in one second? |
| Main capsule | 1232 × 706 | Front-page features and sales. Vertical-ish, so the composition is not the header cropped. | Do not reuse the header. A wide image cropped tall loses whatever made it work. |
| Library capsule | 600 × 900 | The buyer's own library, forever. Seen more than every other asset combined, by the people who already paid. | Readable at 120 px tall, in a grid of forty others. |
| Screenshots | 1920 × 1080 | Five to eight. The first three are the only ones most people see. | Every one shows a decision or a place. None of them shows a menu. |
The first two lines
Then say the one unusual thing
Not the best thing — the unusual one. "The tide table is the clock" is worth more than "beautiful hand-painted art", which every page says.
No adjectives you would use about any game
Immersive, atmospheric, stunning, unique. Delete all four and see whether the sentence still says anything. Usually it says more.
Length and price in the first screen
It reads as confidence rather than as a caveat, and the people it puts off were going to refund.
The trailer, second by second
- 0:00 – 0:03
- Gameplay. Not a logo, not a studio card, not a black frame.
- The median viewer leaves before second five. Three seconds of branding spends most of the budget you have.
- 0:03 – 0:08
- The unusual thing, shown rather than said.
- If your hook needs a title card to explain it, the hook is the title card and that is a problem worth knowing about now.
- 0:08 – 0:45
- Three or four distinct places or systems, in cuts long enough to read.
- Fast cutting hides a game. It reads as having nothing to show, because that is usually why people do it.
- 0:45 – 1:00
- Title, platforms, wishlist call, and stop.
- Ninety seconds is not better than sixty. Every second past the point you have said everything is a second somebody leaves before the call to action.
Wishlists to units
| Step | Range | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Page visits, launch month | 10,000 | From everything: festivals, streamers, socials, store traffic. The top of the funnel and the only number most developers track. |
| Wishlist conversion | 5 – 12% | Of visitors. A clear first paragraph and a "skip it if" section both move this, and the second one moves it more than people expect. |
| Wishlists at launch | 500 – 1,200 | The number that decides whether the store shows the game to anyone at all. |
| Launch-week conversion | 10 – 20% | Of wishlists, in the first week. Higher for a game people have been waiting for; lower for one wishlisted in a festival eighteen months ago. |
| Launch-week units | 50 – 240 | The honest range for a first commercial indie release with no publisher. Every plan should survive the bottom of it. |
These are bands because the real numbers vary by an order of magnitude between genres, and anybody quoting a single conversion figure is selling a course. The useful discipline is to build the budget against the bottom of each band and treat the top as luck.
Launch week
- T-14 days Press and creator emails go out with a key, a one-paragraph pitch and a date. Not a request for coverage — a date and a key.
- T-7 days Store page final: capsules, trailer, the "skip it if" section, accessibility list. Nothing about the page changes in launch week.
- T-1 day Build uploaded, branch tested, refund policy read once more. Sleep.
- Day 0 Post once, answer everything, and do not read the sales page more than twice. The first day is not the number.
- Day 2–7 Patch the two things everybody reports. Visible, fast fixes in week one do more for reviews than anything in the build did.
- Day 14 Write the post-mortem while it still hurts. It is the most valuable document you will produce and it has a very short window.
6 ways a launch page underperforms
- Three seconds of studio logo at the top of the trailer, spending most of the attention you had.
- A first paragraph that says "immersive atmospheric experience" and never says what you do.
- The header capsule cropped to fill the library slot, losing the composition that made it work.
- No "skip it if" section, and a refund rate that quietly eats the launch.
- Length and price hidden, so the people who mind find out after paying rather than before.
- Store page still being edited on day one, when the only thing that should change is the build.
Capsule dimensions follow current Steam guidance and change; check the partner documentation before exporting. Conversion bands are for premium single-player PC releases without a publisher and do not transfer to free-to-play or mobile.