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Valve Streamlines Steam Store Tags List, Reveals Most Ubiquitous Tags
As for removed tags, Valve argues that some tags, like NSFW and Mature, are too generic, and there are more descriptive tags that should be used in their place, while other tags, like LEGO and 3D Vision, have been removed over IP concerns—in these IP-related cases, franchise pages will fill the same discoverability niche as a tag. Other tags were also removed for being too subjective or underused. With the changes, Valve hopes to make tag filtering more effective, whether filtering to include or exclude tags from your search. Valve also revealed the most popular tags on Steam. Singleplayer is the most-used, with over 98,000 games or about 62% of all Steam games, getting that tag. Indie, with 53% of the Steam library, came in second, followed by Action, Casual, and Adventure.
New Tags
New tags are added when there are enough games on Steam that the tag could apply to, and when we think it helps establish a connection between games that couldn’t already be attained through other combinations of tags. Some of these are content-specific, such as “Wolves” and “Zoo”. Others represent broader genres such as “Bullet Heaven” and “Desktop Companion”. And some tags cover specific game mechanics such as “Organizing” and “Decorating”.
Here is the full list of tags added today:
- Bullet Heaven – The opposite of Bullet Hell; Focus on upgrades while automatically attacking hordes of enemies
- Desktop Companion – Games that only use part of your screen and keep you company while you do other things
- Organizing – Tidy up, de-clutter, or unpack, carefully placing items in virtual spaces
- Cleaning – Satisfying removal of grime and dirt from stuff
- Decorating – Creative placement of furniture and other objects
- Wuxia – Historical fantasy adventure featuring martial arts, competing sects, and inner qi
- Xianxia – Fantasy adventure focused on cultivating supernatural powers and strength
- Falling Blocks – Arranging, rotating, and placing blocks from above
- Espionage – Spying or secretly securing valuable intel
- Samurai – Japanese warriors best known for katanas, loyalty, and self-discipline
- Zoo – Care for and display a park full of wild animals
- Wolves – Also known as Canis Lupus
- Capybaras – The largest and possibly most adorable rodent species
- Animals – Cute and furry, or large and terrifying and everything in between
- Cult – Small groups with extreme devotion to a person, thing, or belief
- Poker – Draw, bet, and bluff
- Language Learning – Learning and teaching new languages
Removed Tags
We haven’t often removed tags from Steam, so we’ve built up quite a list. The set that we’ve removed today are done so because they no longer serve a good purpose for establishing connections between games or describing unique and useful elements of content in the game. Many of these tags have alternative options on Steam that better describe the content, and already have a high degree of overlap in application.For example, both the “NSFW” tag and the “Mature” tag have a very high degree of overlap with more descriptive tags such as “Gore”, “Violent”, and “Sexual Content”.
Some of the other tags that we are removing today are perhaps too subjective like “Well-Written” and “Masterpiece”, resulting in disagreements and inconsistent application. Some tags just don’t apply to very many products, such as “Drama” and “Ambient”.
And lastly, there are a number of tags that apply to specific intellectual property, an attribute that community-sourced information like tags is not well suited for. These collections of intellectual property are typically already covered by the developers and publishers setting up franchise pages to collect together officially all the content shared by that IP.
Here is the full list of tags being removed:
- 3D Vision
- Ambient
- America
- Blood
- Crowdfunded
- Cult Classic
- Documentary
- Drama
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Electronic
- Experience
- Feature Film
- Foreign
- GameMaker
- Games Workshop
- Illuminati
- Kickstarter
- LEGO
- Masterpiece
- Mature
- Movie
- Narration
- NSFW
- Roguevania
- RPG Maker
- Warhammer 40K
- Web Publishing
- Well-Written
Modified Tags
We also have a set of tags that we’ve renamed or merged together to clean up some redundancy or to explain the content more clearly.
- “Clicker” has been renamed into “Incremental” to capture the broader essence of games that focus on numbers going up.
- “Conversation” has been renamed to “Dialogue Heavy” for clarity
- We’ve made a few tags plural to match other tags: Dogs, Foxes, Vampires, Elves, Dwarves, and Assassins
- “Pool” was humorously applied to games with a swimming pool, so we’ve renamed this to “Billiards”, which is the overarching term for all games played with cue sticks anyway
- Merging “Jet” into “Flight”, as the term “Jet” was not unique enough.
- Merging “Unforgiving” into “Difficult” since these terms mostly overlap in usage and intent
