Official Group for Steamworks Development Support

New Visual Game Description Editor

Today's Steamworks update brings you a completely re-worked editor for authoring and updating your game's store page description, including image management. This new "WYSIWYG" ("What You See Is What You Get") editor makes it so you can see what your game's "About This Game" section will look like as you work. Additionally, we've reworked the image management for your description to make it easier to add, replace, and remove images.

You'll find the new tools on by default now within the 'description' tab of your game's store editor tool.

See exactly how your description will look as you work, with a real-time preview of your text, images, and other formatting. No more needing to flip between 'beta' mode preview of your store page to see how your text will lay out. (Of course you can still use beta preview mode to see how your description looks within the context of the rest of your page)

If you've already got a draft of your store page description in Microsoft Word, Google Doc, or other writing tools, you can easily paste that content into the new editor and preserve all the supported formatting. bulleted list, headlines, italics, and more.

Note that there are some limitations to how Steam can interact with the Windows clipboard. Copying a mix of images and text from web sources (web-based Word docs or Google Docs) should work well, but other sources won't always be able to preserve the images. Copying and pasting an image individually seems to work just fine.

Now you can paste images directly into the visual editor, or drag-and-drop from a folder on your desktop directly into the editor space.



Any uploaded image will also be saved in the 'Custom Images' section, which itself has also received an update to more clearly present the uploaded images. And of course you can still work the previous way by specifically selecting and uploading files in the 'Upload Custom Images' section and then insert them into your description.

Click the new 'edit' icon in the corner of any image in your editor and choose a different file from your previously uploaded images to easily swap.



Some other improved usability tools come along with the new tool:

• Spellcheck - We all love the helpful assistance when cleaning up the red squiggly lines of misspelled words
  
• Keyboard shortcuts - Use typical key strokes such as CTRL+b for bold or CTRL+i for italics and so forth
  
• Undo/redo - Use the new explicit buttons to undo/redo or keyboard shortcuts ( CTRL+z / CTRL+y )
  
• Automatic formatting - Enter a * and hit space to quickly start a bulleted list

If you're using a "Special Announcement" section to describe special edition contents or adding some award icons to your store page's right-hand column, you'll find the new visual editor there to help you get it looking good.


Q. I'm going to miss bbcode editor. Can I still make manual edits?
A. You can switch between the new rich editor and the old bbcode editor, but it won't be pretty. The new editor does continue to write bbcode, but is not optimized for human-readable presentation. Good luck.

Q. Why is the formatting markup called 'bbcode'?
A. The formatting language and style was originally borrowed from online bulletin boards, the predecessor to what we now typically call 'forums'. Hence the "BB" part of "BBcode". While the terminology doesn't make a lot of sense when used in authoring something like a game's written description (which is clearly not a bulletin board or forum), the formatting language's use within Valve dates back to some of the original Valve games' bulletin boards in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Since it was already in use as we set up the original Steam user forums, and subsequently various Steam community and store features, it made sense to keep and use the familiar formatting across all text editors. You can still find bbcode formatting in widespread use in Steam Events & Announcements editor, Steam Community Discussions, Steam Community Guides, and Steam Workshop.