Steam to ban non-screenshots from store pages
"Please show customers what your game is actually like to play."
Steam's impending "Discovery Update 2.0" will change its policy so that all images on a game's store page will have to be in-game screenshots. No more concept art or pre-rendered stills here folks.
"Regardless of the content in your game, please make sure that images uploaded to the 'screenshot' section of your store page are actually screenshots of your game," Valve said in a copy of its update notes, sent to Eurogamer.
"We haven't been super crisp on guidelines for screenshots in the past, so we'd like to take this opportunity to clarify some rules in this space. When the 'screenshot' section of a store page is used for images other than screenshots that depict the game, it can make it harder for customers to understand what the product is that they are looking at," Valve stated. "Additionally, we're going to start showing game screenshots in more places as described above, and these images need to be able to represent the game.
"We ask that any images you upload to the 'screenshot' section of your store page should be screenshots that show your game. This means avoiding using concept art, pre-rendered cinematic stills, or images that contain awards, marketing copy, or written product descriptions. Please show customers what your game is actually like to play."
Valve admitted that it hasn't always followed these rules itself, though it's making a concerted effort to change that. "Dota 2 is an example of where we were doing it wrong ourselves. We're now in the process of updating Dota 2 to use screenshots of the game rather than artwork," the company said, offering the following image denoting what it had been doing wrong.
This will be great news to those who took issue with No Man's Sky's Steam page, which continued to promote its E3 2014 pre-rendered trailer as the default video that plays upon loading the site. It also used a lot of images from that era that don't reflect the actual game. Indeed the Advertising Standards Authority has been investigating No Man's Sky's Steam store page, which, as of now, still hosts the controversially misleading marketing materials.
Valve noted that Discovery Update 2.0 is still "a couple weeks away from going live".