It's Time for Real Change

Steam's Store Tags

Hey folks, SirViolentDeath here with a short article while our fearless leader, Mellow, is busy reorganizing his tea collection. This week I wanted to talk about Valve’s Steam Store tags, since they did a blog post last week about the changes they made to them, which include: adding new ones, removing redundant ones, and also removing IP-specific ones. This got me thinking about the tag system: How useful are Store tags? What could be done to improve them? But before we get to the questions its important to understand how tags work.

After reading through the Steamworks documentation page about tags and Valve’s page about tags , here is how the tag process seems to work on Steam. When a developer is setting up their store page, they can select some tags that they feel apply to their game. Once the game has been published to Steam (and the store page is public), users can start applying tags they feel apply to the game, including tags that already exist and tags that don't. The tags that don't exist won't show up unless there are enough people applying that tag, and that tag has been approved by Steam. If a developer feels that any tags on their game are inaccurate, they can remove those tags or add new ones from Steam’s approved list. New tags can be generated from Steam users as long as there is no profanity and enough users have applied the same tag. For example, enough users are applying the word “Cat” to the game Stray.


There are some tags that I think are useful because they are both descriptive enough and niche enough for someone to find what they are looking for. Take, for example, “souls-like”; if a player is looking for games similar to, say, “Dark Souls”, then “souls-like” is perfect for their needs when searching by that tag. Stardew Valley has the Farming Sim tag, which is a great fit for it, and developers looking to market their game to Stardew Valley fans would want to use that tag in order to attract potential players. So far, so good; however, there are also some problems with other tags, mainly that they are too broad. For example, if a developer makes something similar to Stardew Valley but didn't use the “farm-sim” tag and instead used only simulation, open world, and agriculture. Those tags could apply to games like the Farming Simulator series. Sure, those tags are relevant, but are (in my opinion) too broad, and the developer could miss out on potential players. One last thing about how some tags are used is to protest developers who anger their players, usually by applying the “psychological horror” tag. This happened when some people protested against Hogwarts Legacy because of J.K. Rowling's remarks on Trans people [archive.ph].

While the tag system is decent, I think there are a couple of things Valve could do to improve it. First, I would add a definitions page or tooltip for all current tags on Steam, no matter how silly it might seem to explain a tag like “cats”. The second idea would be to perhaps have a page strictly dedicated to new user-generated tag suggestions. Rather than have new tags come up from players applying them to games all over Steam with no concentrated effort, have a separate page where players can submit new tags that include a clear definition of what they mean and a few examples of games on Steam that those tags would apply too It would have a definition and what game would apply to it. I would also have a section or list of retired or blacklisted user-generated tags so that users can see what was already attempted before and not repeat those. I lied, one last request would be to be able to erase a user’s previously generated user tags so I don’t have to be reminded of how cringey [imgur.com] I was back in 2017!


As trivial as it seems, I do think that tags on Steam can have a big impact on both developer and player experience. It's how I found some of the games I played. I would never have discovered some of the RTS games that I played and loved, like Rusted Warfare (not a paid promotion, just want to give the game some love). It can help a player find new games and a developer find their player base. While Steam’s current tag system works, there is room for improvement. So, to you, dear reader, I ask what your thoughts are on Steam’s store tags? How would you improve them?

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