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Common mistakes on Korean Steam store pages

By Jisung Yoon · Yunju Company · October 30, 2026 · 5 min read

If you are adding Korean to a Steam game, the store page is the first Korean your players will see. It often gets the least care. Teams spend weeks on in-game strings, then paste a machine-translated short description into Steamworks the night before launch.

Valve's own Steamworks localization documentation says Steam officially supports 29 languages and that "over 60% of Steam users use it in a language other than English." It also notes that the store description, images and trailers can each be localized per language. So a Korean visitor can get a store page that feels made for them, or one that feels like an afterthought.

Below are the mistakes I look for first when I review a Korean store page, roughly in order of how much damage they do.

1. Claiming Korean support the game doesn't fully have

Steam shows a language table with three columns: Interface, Full Audio and Subtitles. Valve's documentation is clear that language support is set by your in-game language settings, not by the store page. Players treat that table as a promise.

Common problems:

• Ticking Interface for Korean when menus are translated but tutorials, item descriptions or quest text are still English.
• Ticking Subtitles when only cutscenes are subtitled and in-game dialogue isn't.
• Ticking Full Audio because the game has Korean text-to-speech in one mode.

Korean players will notice within minutes, and the place they say so is your review section. Be precise: if only part of the game is translated, say so in the description ("UI and story text are in Korean; some item descriptions are in English") rather than leaving players to discover it.

2. A literal translation of the short description

The short description sits next to your capsule art and is often all a browsing player reads. A literal English-to-Korean translation tends to:

• keep English word order, which reads stiffly in Korean;
• stack nouns and adjectives ("a dark, atmospheric, hand-drawn roguelike deckbuilder") into a long chain that is hard to parse;
• translate genre words that Korean players actually use in English or as loanwords. Korean players commonly say 로그라이크 (roguelike), 덱빌딩 (deckbuilding) and 메트로배니아 (metroidvania). A creative Korean coinage for these just looks wrong.

Write the Korean short description as Korean copy from the start: one clear sentence on what the player does, one on what makes it different. Then check it against Korean store pages of similar games in your genre to see which genre terms they use.

3. Mixing formal and casual speech

Korean has several speech levels, and a store page should pick one and keep it. The usual choice for store copy is the polite 합니다/해요 style, or a crisp noun-ending style for feature lists (for example "실시간 협동 전투 지원"). Pages that switch between formal, polite and casual sentence endings from one paragraph to the next read like they were stitched together from different translators. That is often exactly what happened.

Make a one-page style sheet before translating: speech level for the store page, speech level for in-game UI (which may differ), and how to address the player.

4. Inconsistent names and terms

Your game's name, character names, class names and core mechanics should be spelled the same way on the store page, in the game, in patch notes and in community posts. Typical drift:

• the game title is transliterated into Hangul on the store page but left in English in-game;
• a class is called one thing in the description and something else in the screenshots;
• an English term and its Korean equivalent are used for the same mechanic.

Valve's documentation notes that a localized app name overrides the store-page name for that language and is used in search suggestions. So decide deliberately whether your Korean title is the English name, a Hangul transliteration, or a Korean title, and check how players would actually type it into search.

A glossary of 30–100 terms, agreed before translation starts, prevents most of this.

5. English-only screenshots and capsule text

Steamworks lets you upload localized capsule images, screenshots and trailers. If your capsule art has an English tagline baked in, or your screenshots show English UI while the page claims Korean interface support, the page sends mixed signals.

You don't need to remake everything. Priorities:

1. Main and small capsules with text: make Korean versions, or remove the baked-in text.
2. The first two or three screenshots: show the Korean UI if the game supports it.
3. Trailer: Korean subtitles on title cards are often enough.

6. Broken text in the long description

The long "About this game" section supports formatting and images. Common Korean-specific problems:

• Line breaks copied from an English layout leave short orphan lines or break in the middle of a word cluster. Korean line-breaking rules differ from English, so preview the page at desktop and mobile widths.
• Images with English text used as section headers. Make Korean versions, or use text headers.
• Fullwidth vs. halfwidth punctuation and stray characters from copy-paste. Korean normally uses standard halfwidth punctuation; mixing in fullwidth commas or brackets looks careless.
• Font fallback in GIFs or images made with a font that has no Hangul glyphs, which shows up as empty boxes (tofu).

7. Forgetting everything after launch

The store page is not the only Korean surface. Players also see:

• Event and announcement posts. Valve's documentation notes these can be localized too. An English-only patch note after a Korean launch tells Korean players they're second priority.
• Achievement names and descriptions.
• Your replies to Korean reviews. A short, correct Korean reply goes a long way. A machine-translated one can make things worse.

Plan a lightweight process for these: a template for patch notes, a glossary everyone uses, and a person who checks Korean text before it goes live.

8. No review by a native speaker in context

Valve's guidance recommends treating translation and linguistic quality assurance (LQA) as separate steps. The translator should not be the only person who checks the work, and the check should happen in context: on the actual store page and in the running game, not in a spreadsheet.

A context review catches things a spreadsheet can't:

• text that overflows a button or gets cut off;
• a string that is grammatically correct but wrong for the situation (a "Continue" that should be "Next");
• tone that doesn't match the game's personality.

A quick pre-launch checklist

Before you switch the Korean store page on, check:

• ☐ Language table matches what the build actually supports (Interface / Full Audio / Subtitles)
• ☐ Short description written as Korean copy, with genre terms players actually use
• ☐ One speech level throughout the store page
• ☐ Game title and key terms match the glossary everywhere
• ☐ Capsules and first screenshots have Korean or no baked-in text
• ☐ Long description previewed on desktop and mobile; no broken line breaks or missing glyphs
• ☐ Achievements and the launch announcement are localized
• ☐ A native Korean reviewer has checked the live page, not just the source file

Where to look for more

• Steamworks: Localization and Languages. Valve's official guide, including which store assets can be localized.
• The Steam Hardware & Software Survey publishes monthly language usage among Steam users. Valve's documentation points to it as a way to judge which languages to prioritize.

None of these fixes is expensive. Most can be done in a day or two by one person who reads Korean natively and knows what a Steam page is supposed to look like. Doing them before launch is far cheaper than recovering from a wave of reviews that say "번역이 이상해요" ("the translation is weird").

Jisung Yoon is a native Korean speaker in Gwangju, South Korea, and runs Yunju Company (윤주컴퍼니), a small remote studio for Korean localization and marketing content. See the portfolio.