Valve bans devs from adding review scores and awards on Steam store assets

There's a lot of places where developers can have their game logo across Steam, and some developers have been going pretty overboard with noisy images filled with extras. Valve is putting a stop to it.

Announced in a Steamworks blog post Valve mentioned how they've "noticed more text, award logos, and even review scores being included by game developers in their graphical asset images" and that "some game logos themselves have become so small that it's hard for players to tell what the name of the game is" resulting in various graphical assets that are so noisy they're "distracting and hard to read". They also noted in most cases it's all in English too "isolating much of the Steam audience that doesn't speak English".

Hard to really argue with that, as a Steam customer it has become something of a nuisance. The example they included shows a small part of the issue:

There's plenty that did it far worse than their funny example images, but obviously Valve doesn't want to call out developers directly.

New rules come into effect on September 1st, with these clarifications:

• No review scores of any kind, including Steam reviews or external news sources
• No award names, symbols, or logos
• No discount marketing copy (eg. no "On Sale Now" or "Up to 90% off" text)
• No text or imagery promoting a different product. This includes no marketing of sequels or other titles in the same franchise
• No other miscellaneous text

There are a few little exceptions of course, like adjusting the images to tastefully note the latest update which is never really a problem. Valve added a special bit for developers to override an image for one month.

Some developers aren't happy about it though, as it has been another small way to perhaps pull in a bit more attention, with images that have awards some Steam customers might be more likely to click and take a look. I get that developers want to do a little showing off but quite a number really took it too far and Steam has dedicated parts of store pages to list awards and other things.

In other Steam news, Valve has increased production of the Steam Deck!