Valve has made some huge changes to Steam’s discoverability feature by introducing new tags, removing some, and merging a bunch from the digital storefront.
As detailed in the latest blog post, Steam has gained 17 new tags, removed 28, and a handful of others have been merged or updated to improve recommendations for players and enhance developers’ game discoverability.
“These changes are made with the goal of helping players identify the games that best fit their interests, and helping Steam generate appropriate recommendations,” Valve said.
“Tags help developers better describe their game to players, but also help Steam understand what kind of game it is and show it accordingly to players via recommendations. Tags are also the foundation upon which each of the store hubs are built, allowing players to find all of the 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.
Here are just a few examples of the tags that have been added, including “Bullet Heaven”, which Valve said is “the opposite of Bullet Hell” and for games with a “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, “Organizing” for virtual spaces that need a clean up, “Decorating”, which is pretty self-explanatory, and “Wuxia” for Historical fantasy adventure featuring martial arts.
Valve explained that the removed tags were because “they no longer serve a good purpose for establishing connections between games or describing unique and useful elements of content in the game,” and because many of them have alternative options.
“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’,” Valve said.
“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’.”
Some tags apply to specific intellectual property, like “LEGO” or “Warhammer 40K” and are typically already covered by the developers and publishers.
The 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 to “Dialogue Heavy” for clarity, and it’s made a few tags plural 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 been released ahead of the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which were recently delayed due to the ongoing RAM shortage crisis.
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