Valve Adds Bullet Heaven Tag To Define Games With New Store Tags Update

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Valve has been putting a lot of work and effort into making Steam a place where you can easily find new games. There are multiple ways that they do this, with one of them being the user tag system. These tags, defined by users, can be used by developers to describe their game, giving players a chance to see what the game is like and giving Steam a way to recommend games to others. For the first time in 2 years, Valve has updated the tags, creating new ones and removing redundant ones.

With the most recent update, Valve has added 17 new tags to help define games. These include broader subgenres, like Bullet Heaven, big gameplay mechanics, like Organizing and Decorating, and that describe the setting or groups involved, like Samurai and Cult. There are also some very specific ones added here, like Capybara, Wolves, and Poker. And to go along with the animals, we also have a new Animals and Zoo tag.

• 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

However, with so many tags available to choose from, Valve has decided to remove 28 of them. They decide to remove these based on them being too generic, overlapping with other tags, too subjective, or referencing intellectual property that may not be related to the game. Some of these include tags like NSFW or Mature, Dungeons and Dragons, America, and Warhammer 40K.

• 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
• RPGMaker
• Warhammer 40K
• Web Publishing
• Well-Written

They also decided to modify some tags, merging tags like Unforgiving and Jet into other tags they already established (Difficult and Flight). Clicker and Conversation have also been renamed to Incremental and Dialogue Heavy for clarity, and some tags have been made plural.

• "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

I appreciate the changes, since they give us more ways to define games to make it easier to find similar ones we may like. It’s a shame to see some classics disappear, like NSFW and Well-Written, but I can understand why Valve is streamlining the tags to make it more obvious for us and easier for devs (and users) to define the games we are going to play.

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