- Steam Tags Have Received a Big Overhaul for Discovery Purposes
- Valve added 17 new tags, removed 28 and some were merged
- The removed tags “no longer serve to establish connections between games or describe unique and useful content elements in the game.”
Valve has made big changes to Steam’s discovery feature by introducing new tags, removing some, and merging many from the digital store.
As detailed in the latest blog post, Steam gained 17 new tags, removed 28, and a few others were merged or updated to improve recommendations for players and improve the visibility of developers’ games.
“These changes are made with the goal of helping players identify the games that best suit their interests and helping Steam generate appropriate recommendations,” Valve said.
“Tags help developers better describe their game to players, but they also help Steam understand what type of game it is and display it accordingly to players through recommendations. Tags are also the foundation on which each of the store hubs is built, allowing players to find all games tagged with their favorite genre, theme, style, or other relevant context.”
Steam tags are used primarily by developers, but also by players and Steam moderators, so a game’s tags can change over time as users apply their own tags to reflect their experience.
These are just a few examples of the tags that have been added, including “Bullet Heaven”, which Valve says is “the opposite of Bullet Hell” and for games with “Focus on upgrades while automatically attacking hordes of enemies.”
There’s also “Desktop Companion,” for games that accompany the user on their screen while they’re busy doing other things, “Organize” for virtual spaces in need of cleaning, the self-explanatory “Decorate,” and “Wuxia” for historical fantasy adventures with martial arts.
Valve explained that the removed tags were because they “no longer serve to establish connections between games or describe unique and useful content elements in the game”, and because many of them have alternative options.
“For example, both the ‘NSFW’ tag and the ‘Mature’ tag have a high degree of overlap with more descriptive tags such as ‘Gore,’ ‘Violent,’ and ‘Sexual Content,'” Valve said.
“Some of the other labels we are removing today are perhaps too subjective such as ‘Well-written’ and ‘Masterpiece,’ leading to disagreements and inconsistent application. Some labels simply do not apply to many products, such as ‘Drama’ and ‘Ambient.'”
Some tags apply to specific intellectual property, such as “LEGO” or “Warhammer 40K,” and are typically already covered by developers and publishers.
Modified/edited tags more or less represent tags that mean more than one thing, so Valve has made some adjustments. For example, “Conversation” has been renamed “Intense Dialogue” for clarity, and some plural tags have been created to match other tags, such as Dogs, Foxes, Vampires, Elves, Dwarves, and Assassins.
In other news, the new Steam Controller, one of the best PC controllers available now, has officially launched ahead of Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which were recently delayed due to the ongoing RAM shortage crisis.
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