Valve Streamlines Steam Store Tags List, Reveals Most Ubiquitous Tags

Valve's official tags in the Steam Store can be a helpful resource for narrowing down your search for new games, but by Valve's own admission, the list of tags has become somewhat bloated in recent years. In an effort to remedy this, Valve has revealed a rework of the current list of tags, with 17 new tags coming to Steam and 28 tags being removed. The full list is included below the break, but some of the new tag highlights include "Bullet Heaven," a relatively new game genre that gained popularity thanks to games like Vampire Survivors; Samurai; Desktop Companion; Cleaning—for Power Wash Simulator fans—Organizing; and Desktop Companion. In stroke of typical Valve whimsy, it has also defined the tag "Capybaras" as "The largest and possibly most adorable rodent species."

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.