Within the Steam Events & Announcements tools, there are three levels of category for game updates, which each work a little differently: Patch Notes, Regular Updates, and Major Updates. For details on Patch Notes, please see Event Type: Small Update / Patch Notes

What is a Major Update?

Major Updates are designed for use in communicating your biggest game updates and signaling to players that this is one of the biggest moments in the year for your game.

Major Update Visibility

Major update type events can appear in all the regular places, including store page, community hub and Steam Library. These posts will show up to players that follow your game and will qualify to show up in the "What's New" section for your fans at the top of the Steam Library homepage.

1. Library "What's New" section - This section appears at the top of the Steam Library to show players what's happening in the games they play. The visibility of your event here will vary slightly from player to player depending on which games they play, how recently, how much they play, and personalization settings they have set.
   
   
   
   
2. Your game's library page - Major Updates will show up in the list of all events on your game's library page. Additionally, you can choose to 'feature' the event (see below for details) to have it appear more prominently.
   
   
   
   
3. Your game's store page - Major Updates will appear as one of the two events shown on your game's store page.
   
   
   
   And update type events will bring the 'last updated' button up to date with when the most recent update was made for the game:
   
   
   
   
4. Downloads view - If you have associated your update post with the latest build that you've set live, a player will see that in the Steam client's download window.
   
   
   
   
5. Store homepage "Recently Updated" section - If you use an Update Visibility Round, your Major Update can be shown on the homepage to players and wishlisters of your game.
   
   
   
   
6. News Hub - Owners and Followers of your game can see your posts in their News Hub. See your own Steam News Hub.
   
   
   
   
7. Your game's community hub - Your own game's community hub surfaces your posts, alongside community-generated content.

Posting Major Updates

To post about your major update, visit your app's landing page in Steamworks and scroll down to "Post/Manage Events & Announcements". Clicking that option will take you to a screen to select the type of event you wish to post. You can click on "A Game Update" to expand the options and then select "Major Update".

Associating Update Events with your Build

Associate any Update News event with a specific build, which is required to make that event accessible to players from the Downloads view via a PATCH NOTES link. To do so, click the Link to Build button on the Description tab of your event's edit view, then select the branch you'd like to associate with the event.

Minimum Requirements

Major Updates are designed to be prominent and exciting posts, intended to get your player base excited about new content added to the game. With that in mind, you'll want to prepare a bit more content for your post ahead of time.

Event Title	Required	The name of your update
Event Description	Required	Rich, formatted description of your update, including images showing the new content.
Event Cover Image	Required	800px x 450px - Artwork and marketing copy for your event or announcement See details
Event Header Image	Optional	1920px wide x 622px - Event artwork and logo. See template for clipping requirements. See details

Download Image Templates

Beyond these minimum requirements, you may want to craft the body of the post itself to include lots of images, video, and rich description of the update. You can use BBCode to format your post, and our tools support a number of ways of embedding interesting content within the post.

SteamPipe Builds and Patch Notes

When submitting a new build for your game via SteamPipe, a small prompt will automatically appear to encourage you to also post a patch note for your customers. This prompt lets you easily submit your patch notes inlines at the point after submitting the build. Often developers will use this to write a bullet point list of the changes made. Patch notes following your build updates is helpful for your customers to realize you are continuing work on and improve your game.



You can always use the regular event editor to post the patch notes at a later time. Learn more about this prompting feature here.