Steam has released a new update to the store, overhauling the tag system with new additions and some removals.
In a post to the Steam community page, Valve details the update, saying, "These changes are made with the goal of helping players identify the games that best fit their interests, and helping Steam generate appropriate recommendations."
This update adds 17 new tags to the storefront and removes 28 from rotation, with new additions finally getting genres like the Bullet Heaven, which Vampire Survivors popularised, and Desktop Companion, which refers to games that won't take up much of your screen. There are some specific ones, too, like Wolves, Poker, Samurai, and Capybaras, for descriptions of things that are in the game.
The removals took the biggest hit with 28 going away, with Valve explaining, "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." These include the NSFW and Mature tags that are a bit too vague when specific tags like Gore, Sexual Content, and Violent exist.
Alongside these ones, Valve deems "subjective" like Well-Written and Masterpiece, and tags that refer to specific IP, like Lego, Dungeons & Dragons, and Warhammer 40K, which would be applied to games that aren't in those. Plus Valve has renamed and merged a few, tags, with Unforgiving going into difficult and Clicker being replaced with incremental.
While Vampire Survivors wasn't the first game in its genre, its massive success definitely inspired a lot more of that ilk to appear, including last year's standout Megabonk. And now the creators can celebrate that the genre has been canonized by Gaben himself (or, rather, the Valve employees who handle Steam tags).
