Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4006110/Capitaland Reviewed on: 10/03/2026 Current state: Early access
A lot of indie devs look at big established games on Steam and notice they break most of the rules I am about to cover. What they miss is that those games already have an audience. People know what the game is before they even land on the page. Take Slay the Spire 2 as an example. I bought it without reading a single word on the page because I already played the first game and was expecting a sequel for a long time. That is not how it works for most indie games.
Unless you already have a community or a successful game behind you, your Steam page has to do all the work by itself. It has to explain the game fast, look high quality, and make it easy for both Steam and players to understand what kind of game this is.
That is why small mistakes on an indie Steam page hurt a lot more than they do for a big studio.
Steam looks at what people played in the past and recommends similar games. It really is that simple. And that also matches how players browse — when someone checks out a new game, they almost always compare it to something they already know. That is how most people make sense of a new game quickly.
So your Steam page has two jobs.
For Steam: explain clearly what kind of game this is, so it gets shown to the right audience. This matters more than most devs realize. If Steam shows your page to the wrong people and they don't click or wishlist, Steam reads that as a bad signal and starts recommending it less.
For players: make the game look appealing, easy to understand, and high quality enough to earn the click and the wishlist.
If the genre, the core loop, and the hook are not obvious from the page, Steam has a harder time figuring out who should see it and players have a harder time understanding why they should care.
Getting the page right does not guarantee success. But getting it wrong makes everything harder.
With that in mind, these are the games I am using as a reference point for this audit. The point is not to copy them, but to anchor the page to something Steam users already understand.
Think of your capsule image the same way you think of a YouTube thumbnail. When someone is browsing Steam they are scrolling past hundreds of games and your capsule has maybe a second to stop them. It is competing with everything else on the page at the same time. If it does not catch attention fast, look high quality, and give some sense of what kind of game this is, people will scroll right past it and never even reach the rest of your page.
My take — The capsule does not communicate the game clearly enough at first glance. Now that I spent some time with it I understand what you were going for, but an average Steam user scrolling past it will not stop to figure it out. It needs to do that job instantly.
Suggestions — Hire an artist who specializes in capsule art. Look at Big Ambitions as a reference, you can immediately tell what the game is about just from the capsule. The businessman on the right, the city in the background suggesting you can own it, the dollar sign in the title. Everything works together to signal what the game is about instantly. That is exactly what your capsule should be doing.