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Steam Updates Its Tagging System, Adding 17 New Tags and Removing 28

Highlights:

  • Valve update added 17 new tags and removed 28 older ones

  • New tags include Bullet Heaven, wolves, capybaras, decorating, wuxia, poker, and desktop companion

  • Removed tags include broad or overlapping categories like “blood,” “america,” and “Kickstarter”

  • Valve says the changes aim to improve recommendations and game discovery

  • Single-player remains Steam’s most-used tag with roughly 98,000 games


Black Steam logo with stylized lever and circle design on a white background. Text reads "STEAM," framed by a thin black border.

Valve has overhauled Steam's official store tag system, adding 17 new tags, removing 28, and renaming or merging several others.


The last time new tags were introduced was back in 2024, when Dice, Dwarf, Boomer Shooter, and Elf were added.


The purpose of tags on Steam goes beyond simple labelling. Tags feed directly into Steam's recommendation engine, help developers categorize their games, and form the backbone of the store's hub pages where players browse by genre, theme, or mechanic. Developers apply them during the release process, but regular players with non-limited accounts can add them too. Moderators also contribute. This means a game's tags can evolve over time as more people play it and weigh in.


So what's new, what's gone, and what got a name change? Here's a full breakdown.


New Tags Added

  • 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"


The bullet heaven genre in particular has been growing steadily in recent years, driven by games like Vampire Survivors. Getting its own dedicated tag is a clear nod to how far the subgenre has come.


Tags That Have Been Removed

28 tags have been cut entirely. The reasoning varies across the list. Some overlapped too heavily with existing tags. Others were too subjective to apply consistently. A few referenced specific intellectual properties, which Valve says are better handled through official franchise pages.


For example, tags like NSFW and Mature were already redundant. More descriptive options like Gore, Violent, and Sexual Content already covered that ground. Tags like Well-Written and Masterpiece were removed because they led to disagreements and uneven usage. Nobody could fully agree on what qualified.


Here is the full list of removed tags:

  • 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


It is worth noting that IP-based tags like LEGO, Warhammer 40K, and Games Workshop have been removed not because those games are going anywhere, but because franchise pages already serve that purpose more accurately and officially.


Tags That Were Renamed or Merged

A handful of tags got cleaned up rather than removed outright.


Clicker is now Incremental, which better captures games focused on numbers going up over time.


Conversation has been renamed to Dialogue Heavy for clarity.


Several tags were simply made plural to match the rest of the naming style: Dogs, Foxes, Vampires, Elves, Dwarves, and Assassins.


One particularly amusing case is the Pool tag. According to Valve, it kept getting applied to games that had swimming pools in them. It has now been renamed to Billiards, which is the proper term for cue-stick games.


On the merger side, Jet has been folded into Flight. Unforgiving has been merged into Difficult.


As a bit of history, the Singleplayer tag is currently the most commonly used on the platform, applied to over 98,000 games, which accounts for roughly 62% of all titles on Steam. The Indie tag follows with over 82,000 games, with Action, Casual, and Adventure rounding out the top five.


Valve noted that players can start exploring the new hub pages right away and can help tag any games that are missing relevant new labels. Developers also retain the ability to flag or remove inaccurate tags from their store pages.


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