Game thumbnail

You made a great game. Now win the click. Your thumbnail competes for attention while players are surrounded by other games, and it can make or break your numbers.

A static thumbnail is the first thing players see across Poki: on category pages, game pages, and in search results. It's required to start a player fit test, and it directly drives your click-through rate.

Design principles

• Show what's inside. Your thumbnail is a store window: if you sell plants, put a plant in the window. Visuals should closely match the actual game; a mismatch feels like a wrong turn and hurts conversion and playtime. Include your main character in their default skin so players recognize the game and feel they've landed in the right place.
• Embrace simplicity. One clear foreground object, a main character or a key gameplay element, not a collage of everything. Keep the background simple and clean so focus stays where it matters. Less is more: clarity beats complexity at catching the eye.
• Give it motion. A stiff, static pose is easy to scroll past. Suggest movement instead: a platformer character mid-jump or running, a shooter character with weapon raised. A dynamic pose reads as more alive and more clickable.
• Keep a series together. If your game is part of a saga, make thumbnails recognizably related so fans of one entry find the next.

Poki-specific requirements

• Design for small tiles too. Heavy detail turns to mush at small sizes, so make sure the composition still reads when the tile shrinks. Check your thumbnail at both large and small sizes.
• Avoid text. Skip titles and other text and let the visuals carry it. Text quickly becomes unreadable on smaller tiles, and Poki's own tests show players prefer text-free thumbnails: visuals alone drive better performance.
• Mind color and contrast. Contrast makes a thumbnail pop; similar shades fall flat. And the Poki playground background is #83FFE7, so avoid colors too close to it or your thumbnail disappears into the page.
• Remove padding and borders. No borders, padding, or letterboxing. Your thumbnail shows at many sizes across the platform, and extra framing only eats into legibility.
• Don't cut corners. Deliver a full-bleed* square of at least 628x628px. We apply the rounded corners on our end.
  • *Full-bleed means the image fills the entire layout right to the outer borders with no white margins, framed in a 1:1 aspect ratio.

How your thumbnail affects your numbers

A thumbnail's main job is click-through rate (CTR): the share of players who click your game after seeing it. How well the image communicates your game's theme, character, and style, especially sitting among many other games, is what moves that number.

It's a common misconception that thumbnails directly drive conversion to play (C2P), the share of players who start playing after clicking. That's not entirely the case. Thumbnails influence onboarding mostly through expectations: if players click expecting one thing and get another, some drop off before gameplay starts. 

This is especially true on mobile. There, the thumbnail is displayed once more after the player clicks on the game and before the game starts. Making sure your animated thumbnail and static thumbnail accurately reflect your game is extra important here to keep players engaged during these extra steps. 

In summary; C2P is mostly a technical story, driven by loading time, file size, responsiveness, and the pre-play experience. Thumbnails help create that pre-play experience, so make sure they align with what your game has to offer.

Updating your thumbnail

During development, you can update your thumbnail at any time, unless a web fit test is running. Once your game has passed the web fit test, thumbnail changes need sign-off from Poki's Developer Support team: upload the new version in Poki for Developers, and we'll review it and either approve it or come back with feedback. If you're weighing several versions during soft release, reach out and we can help you pick.

After release, we only change thumbnails when the game ships a substantial content update, like a new world, mode, or major feature. A fresh thumbnail on the same old content can leave players feeling misled, which tends to lower engagement and speed up drop-off. When you do launch a big update, submit the new build together with the new thumbnail; the team reviews the update first, then the thumbnail. A strong thumbnail that stays visually consistent with the original can signal new content and pull in more plays. That larger audience raises the stakes: if the update itself doesn’t meet the expectations it sets, engagement and C2P can still dip a little.