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Steam Adds Tagging System - Connects Users with Games

Posted on February 13, 2014

Valve announced today the Beta for Steam Tags, a new way to help players discover products. The player community and game developers now have the ability to tag games with genres, themes, and attributes.

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Tags will only appear on games if a certain amount of other users have also applied that tag to a product, reducing the chance of flooding products with countless irrelevant tags. If you can't think of a tag, but agree with one that already exists, you can reapply those tags. Also, if you were thinking of tagging something less-than-friendly, swear words are automatically filtered out and will not appear.

Right then. We'll see how long that lasts.

The concept of tagging isn't new (YouTube, this very website) and Steam offers a few ways to take advantage of Steam Tags. You can browse popular tags, your friends' tags, and your own tags. Based on the games you've already played, tags are also recommended for you. Tags will help generate filtering controls to give users the games they are looking for; Steam has grown larger over the years, and as a result, "discovery" of new games has become more difficult for the end user. This should help aid discovery of relevant, interesting games for players.

Steam's adding tags so late to the game that the crowd-sourcing effort is likely a necessity: Tags can't really be automated accurately (we should know -- we've had to manually retag 1000 articles before), and now that Steam has in excess of 3000 games in its catalog, a dev-only tagging effort would be slow on the uptake. That's where players come in.

You can read more about Steam tags and how to start using them over here: http://store.steampowered.com/tag

You can browse popular tags here: http://store.steampowered.com/tag/browse/#global_19

- Paige "dino pillow" Spears.