Localized screenshots and trailers for your store page

You translated your store description, ticked three new boxes in the supported-languages list, and published. The page still shows six screenshots full of menus in a language your new audience cannot read, and a trailer whose opening title card is in your own language. Store art is the part of a page that most teams localize last, if they localize it at all.

That ordering is backwards relative to how a store page is actually consumed. Images load first, they are what a browsing player looks at first, and they are the part of your page that travels — into search results, wishlist emails, curator posts, and video sites — where none of your translated text follows.

This article is about the store side: screenshots, capsule and header images, and trailers. Text baked into your game's own textures and UI is a related problem with a different solution, and it is worth treating separately.

Players look at your images before they read a word

A store page is not read top to bottom. A player arrives from a search result, a tag page, a friend's activity feed, or a curator post, and spends a second or two deciding whether this game is worth more attention. In that second they see the capsule image, then the trailer thumbnail, then the first two or three screenshots. The description — the part you translated — is what they read after they have already decided to keep looking.

So the first localized thing a player encounters on your page is not your text. It is a picture of your game with your interface in it. If that interface is covered in characters they cannot read, the picture has answered 'is this game for me' before your description got a turn.

This is also why the supported-languages list does not rescue the situation on its own. The list is a claim; the screenshot is evidence. When a claim and a piece of evidence disagree, most people believe the evidence, and the ones who do not believe it usually resolve the doubt by leaving rather than by investigating.

What an untranslated screenshot actually communicates

A player who cannot read the interface in your screenshot still draws a conclusion from it. It is worth being specific about which conclusion, because they are not all the same and they cost you different things.

The most common is also the flattest: this game is not available in my language. That reading loses the sale silently — no click, no wishlist, no trace in your data that anything happened. Two other readings are worse in their own way. One is partial coverage: the subtitles are probably translated but the menus are not, or only the story is done. The other is neglect: a page whose text is in my language while every single image is not can read as an automatically translated listing, which invites the assumption that the game's text was handled the same way.

The fourth reading is that nothing is wrong at all. Some genres carry an import culture — players who seek out Japanese-developed RPGs, doujin games, or niche simulation titles have bought games with untranslated pages before and know how to interpret them, and for them the foreign script can be atmosphere rather than a warning. The problem is that this only holds for players already looking for your kind of game. It does nothing for the much larger group who found you by browsing a tag, and it does not survive contact with a price tag: a player who reads a screenshot as 'this looks localized', buys, and then meets an untranslated menu has a refund and a review in front of them, which is worse than the sale you never made.

This cuts in both directions, incidentally. An English interface in every screenshot is exactly as opaque on a Japanese store page as a Japanese interface is on an English one. Teams tend to notice the problem in one direction only, because they can read their own language and stop looking.

Which store slots can hold language-specific art

Modern storefronts localize more than the description. Beyond the text fields, they generally let you attach images and video per language, falling back to a default set for any language you have not covered. Which slots accept a per-language variant, what sizes are required, and how the fallback resolves differ by platform and change over time, so read the partner documentation section on localized store assets rather than trusting any blog post — including this one — for the specifics.

The structure underneath is stable enough to plan around:

• There is always a default set, shown to everyone whose language you have not covered — partial coverage is safe, and you never break the page by localizing only two languages
• Assets are usually attached per language, not per country, so one set serves many markets — but check how the platform splits variants such as Latin American versus European Spanish, or Simplified versus Traditional Chinese
• Uploading a localized image does not change what your supported-languages list claims; those are separate declarations and they need to agree with each other
• Video and images are usually separate upload paths with separate localization behavior — confirm both before you plan a capture session

Design store art that is cheap to localize

The most expensive art to localize is art where the text is inseparable from the picture. Most of the cost of localized store assets is decided when the asset is first made, not when the second language is added.

Start with screenshot selection. You usually have far more candidate frames than slots, and some carry much less text than others. A combat shot mid-animation, a quiet exploration frame, a well-composed environment: these communicate genre, art direction, and mood without a single readable word, and they need no localized variant at all. Reserve the text-heavy screenshots for cases where the text is the feature you are selling — a dialogue system, a deckbuilder's card layout, a stat screen.

For any marketing text you overlay on a screenshot, keep the text on its own layer and keep the source file. A caption in an editable layer is a five-minute swap per language. The same caption flattened into a PNG is a redraw. Store the whole set under a predictable naming scheme so that adding a language later is a mechanical job rather than an archaeology project.

Then design the box, not the sentence. A caption that exactly fills its space in your language will overflow in German or Russian and look sparse in Japanese or Chinese, which usually need fewer characters to say the same thing. Leave headroom, and pick a text position that tolerates two lines. Check your display font at the same time: a decorative Latin font has no kanji, no Hangul and no Cyrillic, so decide now what typeface the Japanese version of that caption is set in, rather than discovering it under deadline.

store-assets/
  screenshots/
    01-battle.psd            # text lives on its own layer
    01-battle_en.png
    01-battle_ja.png
    01-battle_zh-Hans.png
    02-exploration.png       # no text - one file serves every language
  capsule/
    capsule_main.psd
    capsule_main_en.png
    capsule_main_ja.png
  trailer/
    trailer_master_clean.mp4 # no burned-in text
    trailer_captions_en.srt
    trailer_captions_ja.srt

Trailers: three layers of language, and where trailers travel

A trailer is not one localization problem but three, and separating them is most of the work. There is burned-in marketing text (title cards, feature callouts, the date card at the end), there is in-game footage that happens to show your interface, and there is audio — narration or dialogue — with whatever subtitles sit under it.

Each layer has its own cheapest fix. Audio is usually better served by a subtitle track than by re-recording, and platforms that host your trailer generally support attaching one. Burned-in text is best kept out of the master: edit the trailer with a clean video and put the text on an overlay track in your project, so producing a language variant is a re-render rather than a re-edit. In-game footage is the hardest, because matching footage in another language means capturing the same scenes again from a build in that language — far easier while the build is fresh than six months later, when the scenes may no longer exist in that form.

Whatever you do, leave timing headroom. A caption that is comfortable to read in your language will feel rushed in a language that needs more characters, and re-cutting a trailer to add half a second per card is much more painful than leaving that half second in from the start.

The last point is the one most often missed: the trailer is the most portable thing you make. It gets embedded in articles, reposted on video sites, shown in festival reels, and reacted to on stream — all places your localized store description does not follow it to. A trailer that communicates what the game is without requiring anyone to read is not only cheaper to localize, it reaches people your store page never will.

Check it like a stranger, then spend in this order

Before deciding what to make next, look at your own page the way the intended player will. Storefronts let you change the display language of the store itself; switch it, load your page cold, and do not scroll to the part you are proud of. If the top of the page cannot answer 'what is this, and is it in my language' in about two seconds, it is not finished.

Then ask one person who actually reads that language for a five-second reaction — not a review of your translation, just what they think the game is and what language it is in. That question surfaces problems no checklist does, because it measures the only thing the art has to accomplish.

Afterwards, watch your regional traffic and wishlist data, but attribute changes carefully. Store art almost never ships alone; it usually arrives alongside a description rewrite, a sale, or an update post. Treat the numbers as a direction rather than a measurement, and keep the assets that make your page legible to people who cannot read your language even when the numbers stay ambiguous.

Almost nobody has the budget for a complete localized asset set in every language at launch, and almost nobody needs one. When you decide what to produce next, spend in this order:

• The capsule or header image, if it carries a tagline — it appears in search results, recommendation rows and wishlist emails, so it is seen far more often than the page itself
• The first two or three screenshots, which is as far as most browsing players look
• Trailer captions for your top one or two languages, chosen from your own regional wishlist and traffic data rather than a generic ranking
• The remaining screenshots, in the order they appear on the page
• Everything else, and only once the languages above have proven they are worth it