Steamworks Documentation
Steam Tags

Steam Tags

In addition to helping Steam users quickly learn about your game, tags help Steam determine where your game should be displayed to customers. We recently began requiring at least 5 tags be applied to a title before its launch on Steam, but we recommend you add up to 20. In addition to displaying tag data on store pages, a robust set of tags helps Steam serve better results when users:

- Browse genres & categories
- Search with tags
- Explore tag-driven recommendations
- Utilize tag-driven dynamic Collections in the Library and more

Below is some information on how tags work and some tools you can use to manage them.

Applying Tags

Tags can be applied to a game by the developer, by players with non-limited accounts, and by Steam moderators. This allows the community to help mark up games with the terms, themes, and genres that help describe the game to others.

As the developer of a game, you can define its tags using the Steamworks Tag Wizard, which you'll find in your game's Store Presence / Edit Store Page / Basic Info section, under Tags. For a list of titles most in need of tagging, visit your Steamworks Recommended Actions page, where you’ll find links to the Tag Wizard per title you manage.

This wizard steps through a series of screens to help you build a well-rounded tag profile for your title. The wizard also provides an opportunity to order your title's tags for weighting purposes. Many tags can be applied to your game, but only the top 20 are visible to users and used by Steam to influence visibility of your title in the store. For more information, refer to the Tags and Store Visibility section below.

Note that tags and their relative weights may change over time as members of the community apply them to your game. While this tends not to fluctuate over time, you can revisit your tags and their weights using the Tag Wizard at any time.

Deciding which tags to apply

Of the hundreds of approved tags on Steam, it can be hard to decide which are most applicable to your game. We've designed the Tag Wizard to assist you through this process.

The Tag Wizard helps you identify a breadth of relevant tags across Genres, Visuals & View Points, Themes & Moods, Features, Player support, and more. As the wizard learns about your game, it highlights tags which may be relevant, based on commonalities found among similar titles on Steam. The Tag Wizard helps you create a tag profile which includes:


  • Genres, with particular attention to the most specific Genre or Sub-Genre
    • Example: Super Meat Boy can most specifically be described as a Precision Platformer
    • Super-Genre: Action
    • Genre: Platformer
    • Sub-Genre: Precision Platformer
  • Visual properties, such as
    • Dimensions: 2D, 2.5D, 3D
    • Camera Perspective: Third-Person, First-Person, Top-Down, Isometric, Side-Scroller, etc.
    • Visual Style: Pixel Graphics, Realistic, Abstract, Anime, Cute, Stylized, Minimalist, etc.
  • Themes & Moods, such as
    • Theme: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Space, Zombies, Vampires, etc.
    • Mood: Relaxing, Funny, Atmospheric, etc.
  • Features, such as
    • Gameplay mechanics like Choices Matter, Resource Management, Trading, etc.
    • Design ingredients like Physics, Procedural Generation, etc.
    • Player activities such as Sailing, Mining, Hacking, etc.

If you're having trouble deciding which tags make sense, take a look at similar games on Steam and note the tags applied to those games. You can also browse the list of popular tags to see if any apply to your game, or consult the comprehensive table at the bottom of this document.

Publishing tag updates

Once you complete the tagging wizard, you'll be prompted to publish your changes. This publish process is separate from the store page publish, so the tag publish process from within the wizard will not impact any pending store changes you have.

Tags and Store Visibility

The tags associated with your game impact where and how it appears on Steam. Steam uses this information to figure out which browsing pages your game should appear on and which other games your game is most like, for recommendation purposes.

Order and weight of tags

The tags given the most weight govern your visibility more than those given less. Your title's top 5 tags should paint a fairly clear picture of your game as those tags will also be used to describe your game. Tags are ordered on your game page by the amount of weight each has on your game, as a result of your own sorting in the Tag Wizard. This can be modified over time as a number of players apply particular tags to your game. Some store filters prioritize the first 15 tags, so be sure that these are sorted in order of relevance to your title.

The Tag Wizard helps set these weights with a Suggest Prioritization feature. This is a very simple algorithm that moves high-information tags like sub-genres to the top, and redundant or low-information tags (like “indie” or “singleplayer”) to the bottom. It’s just meant as a simple starting point. It’s not guaranteed to be accurate because it has no knowledge of what your game is actually like. Feel free to try it as a starting point, and override it as you see fit.

You can also use the display of similarly tagged titles to help you create a tag profile which places you among comparable titles on Steam. Note that this is not a direct reflection of the More Like This algorithm's results, but rather, a strictly tag-driven comparison of title similarity.

So, as a recap, start setting tags and their weight by using the Tag Wizard. Customers will also tag your game and those tags will be mixed in with the tags you had set with the Tag Wizard. As customers add more tags, the weight for those tags will increase. You can remove any tags you find unwanted ("family friendly" for a horror game) or inaccurate ("2D" for a 3D game).

Tag page visibility

The top 20 tags on your game determine the tag pages and similar browse views that your game can appear on.

Recommendations

Steam offers users a number of different recommendation mechanisms, some of which leverage tags to determine similarity between titles as an axis for recommendation.

Where tags are applicable, the top 20 tags applied to your game will impact which games Steam thinks are similar to yours. Here the order is less important than the overlap between multiple tags. So if your game has "Open World" and "Fantasy", Steam will be more likely to recommend your game to players that have previously played games tagged with "Open World" and "Fantasy". The more tags that overlap, the stronger the correlation and recommendation is for that user.

Some of Steam's recommendation algorithms also factor in less-frequently used tags more than really common ones. So if you have "Action" applied to your game, it matters very little in how your game gets recommended because so many other games have "Action" applied to them. But if you have something like "Party-Based RPG" applied to your game, it has much more influence in matching up with other similar games because there aren't as many games tagged with that term.

The "More Like This" section

Similar to recommendations, Steam looks at the top 20 tags on your game to figure out which other game's pages yours should appear (and which other games should appear on your store page as similar). This is really helpful for players to compare similar games and also to be reassured that your game is similar to other games they might have enjoyed or are interested in.

Search results and filtering

You'll also notice when using search within Steam there is a list of tags on the right-hand side that you can select from to narrow down the results.

Tags and localization

The tags applied to your game are localized, as they may have different words in different languages. For example, the top tag on your game may be "RPG" in English, but it's called "Rollespil" in Danish. The tag order is the same, it's just the translation of the term that changes based on the language of the user.

Tags and Non-Game Content Types

The Tag Wizard can be used in association with any game or DLC on Steam. A Demo inherits the tags associated with its base game.

Tags may also be applied to other app types such as applications, soundtracks, music, tools, videos, etc. with the Steam Store tagging interface, available on your title's store page.

Table of Tags

Top-Level Genres

Tag
Action
Adventure
Casual
Experimental
Puzzle
Racing
RPG
Simulation
Sports
Strategy
Tabletop

Genres

Tag
Action RPG
Action-Adventure
Arcade
Auto Battler
Automobile Sim
Base Building
Baseball
Basketball
Battle Royale
BMX
Board Game
Bowling
Building
Card Game
Character Action Game
Chess
Clicker
Cycling
Diplomacy
eSports
Experimental
Exploration
Farming Sim
Fighting
Football
God Game
Golf
Hacking
Hidden Object
Hockey
Idler
Interactive Fiction
Management
Match 3
Medical Sim
Mini Golf
Mining
MMORPG
MOBA
Motocross
Open World
Outbreak Sim
Party-Based RPG
Pinball
Platformer
Point & Click
Rhythm
Roguelike
RTS
Sandbox
Shooter
Skateboarding
Skating
Skiing
Snowboarding
Soccer
Space Sim
Stealth
Strategy RPG
Survival
Tennis
Tower Defense
Trivia
Turn-Based Strategy
Visual Novel
Walking Simulator
Word Game
Wrestling

Sub-Genres

Tag
2D Fighter
2D Platformer
3D Fighter
3D Platformer
4X
Action Roguelike
Arena Shooter
Beat 'em up
Bullet Hell
Card Battler
Choose Your Own Adventure
City Builder
Collectathon
Colony Sim
Combat Racing
CRPG
Dating Sim
Dungeon Crawler
Education
Flight
FPS
Grand Strategy
Hack and Slash
Heist
Hero Shooter
Horror
Immersive Sim
Investigation
JRPG
Life Sim
Looter Shooter
Metroidvania
Mystery Dungeon
On-Rails Shooter
Open World Survival Craft
Political Sim
Precision Platformer
Programming
Real Time Tactics
Roguelite
Roguevania
Runner
Shoot 'Em Up
Side Scroller
Sokoban
Solitaire
Souls-like
Spectacle fighter
Spelling
Survival Horror
Tactical RPG
Third-Person Shooter
Time Management
Top-Down Shooter
Trading
Trading Card Game
Traditional Roguelike
Turn-Based Tactics
Twin Stick Shooter
Typing
Wargame

Visuals & Viewpoint

Tag
2.5D
2D
360 Video
3D
3D Vision
Abstract
Anime
Cartoon
Cartoony
Cinematic
Colorful
Comic Book
Cute
First-Person
FMV
Hand-drawn
Isometric
Minimalist
Noir
Pixel Graphics
Psychedelic
Realistic
Split Screen
Stylized
Text-Based
Third Person
Top-Down
Voxel
VR

Themes & Moods

Tag
1980s
1990's
Agriculture
Aliens
Alternate History
America
Atmospheric
Assassin
Bikes
Capitalism
Cats
Cold War
Comic Book
Conspiracy
Crime
Cyberpunk
Dark
Dark Fantasy
Demons
Destruction
Detective
Dinosaurs
Diplomacy
Dog
Dragons
Dynamic Narration
Economy
Education
Faith
Family Friendly
Fantasy
Foreign
Futuristic
Gambling
Game Development
Gothic
Heist
Historical
Horses
Illuminati
Investigation
Jet
Lemmings
LGBTQ+
Logic
Loot
Lovecraftian
Magic
Management
Mars
Mechs
Medieval
Memes
Military
Modern
Motorbike
Mystery
Mythology
Nature
Naval
Ninja
Offroad
Old School
Otome
Parkour
Philosophical
Pirates
Political
Politics
Pool
Post-apocalyptic
Programming
Retro
Robots
Romance
Rome
Satire
Science
Sci-fi
Sniper
Snow
Space
Stealth
Steampunk
Submarine
Superhero
Supernatural
Surreal
Survival
Swordplay
Tactical
Tanks
Thriller
Time Travel
Trains
Transhumanism
Transportation
Underground
Underwater
Vampire
War
Werewolves
Western
World War I
World War II

Features

Tag
6DOF
Archery
Artificial Intelligence
Asymmetric VR
ATV
Automation
Base Building
Boxing
Building
Bullet Time
Character Customization
Choices Matter
Class-Based
Combat
Conversation
Crafting
Deckbuilding
Driving
Fishing
Flight
FMV
Grid-Based Movement
Gun Customization
Hack and Slash
Hacking
Hex Grid
Hunting
Inventory Management
Level Editor
Linear
Martial Arts
Mining
Moddable
Multiple Endings
Music-Based Procedural Generation
Narration
Naval Combat
Nonlinear
Open World
Perma Death
Physics
Procedural Generation
PvE
PvP
Quick-Time Events
Resource Management
Sailing
Score Attack
Stealth
Story Rich
Tabletop
Team-Based
Text-Based
Time Manipulation
Trading
Turn-Based Combat
Turn-Based Tactics
Tutorial
Vehicular Combat
Female Protagonist
Silent Protagonist
Villain Protagonist
Minigames
Intentionally Awkward Controls

Players

Tag
4 Player Local
Asynchronous Multiplayer
Co-op
Co-op Campaign
Local Co-Op
Local Multiplayer
Massively Multiplayer
Multiplayer
Online Co-Op
Singleplayer

Other Tags

Tag
Based on a Novel
Batman
Documentary
Drama
Dungeons & Dragons
Episodic
Experience
Feature Film
Games Workshop
Indie
Lara Croft
LEGO
Mod
Movie
Music
Real-Time
Real-Time with Pause
Remake
Sequel
Soundtrack
Star Wars
Time Attack
Turn-Based
Warhammer 40K

Software

Tag
Animation & Modeling
Audio Production
Benchmark
Design & Illustration
GameMaker
Gaming
Photo Editing
RPGMaker
Software
Software Training
Utilities
Video Production
Web Publishing

Assessments

Tag
Addictive
Beautiful
Classic
Competitive
Cult Classic
Difficult
Emotional
Epic
Fast-Paced
Funny
Great Soundtrack
Lore-Rich
Masterpiece
Psychological
Relaxing
Replay Value
Short
Unforgiving
Comedy
Dark Comedy

Ratings etc

Tag
Blood
Gore
Mature
NSFW
Nudity
Sexual Content
Violent

Hardware / Input

Tag
Controller
Hardware
Mouse only
Steam Machine
Touch-Friendly
TrackIR
Voice Control

Funding etc.

Tag
Crowdfunded
Early Access
Free to Play
Kickstarter