Steam Changes Store Tags — All New, Removed, and Changed Tags

Every once in a while, Valve likes to update the Store Tags to bring some new additions to the system on Steam. The platform utilises this information in order to help with the player recommendations over on the Store, which keeps in mind all of a player's behaviour across several tags.

The last time we received some new ones was back in 2024, when we got the Dice, Dwarf, Boomer Shooter, and Elf tags, some of which have become prominent ones on the store page since. Boomer Shooter, for instance, comes to mind as an important tag over recent years.

Now, the latest batch of tags have arrived, bringing a massive list of changes to the overall line-up. In total, Steam added 17 new tags, removed 28, and merged or updated a few others, making the Store Tags a bit more accurate and in-depth, fitting categories that, before, were struggling to find specific descriptors.

Let's start with the added tags. Valve has officially recognised the Vampire Survivors–started genre, Bullet Heaven, as an official tag. It's an exciting end to the discussion between that and survivor-like that's been plaguing the industry since the launch of poncle's debut title.

Another notable change is the addition of the Desktop Companion tag, which is evidently spearheaded by Bongo Cat. It's accompanied by Organizing, which was likely heavily influenced by the release and prominence of Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, bringing organisational tools to Steam.

It's also exciting to see how the arrival of the Steam Chinese audience slowly affects the tags accordingly, as Steam evolves with its new players. The addition of Wuxia and Xianxia proves that there is a prominent voice in Chinese players (if the Slay the Spire 2 Mostly Negative review bomb didn't already prove that).

And finally, how to forget the massive change brought forth by LocalThunk and Playstack's Balatro? Having shaken the videogame industry into a spiral of gambling-inspired experiences, it's no surprise that a new Poker tag has been added following the game's success.

Here are the new tags added to the list:

• Bullet Heaven
• Desktop Companion
• Organizing
• Cleaning
• Decorating
• Wuxia
• Xianxia
• Falling Blocks
• Espionage
• Samurai
• Zoo
• Wolves
• Capybaras
• Animals
• Cult
• Poker
• Language Learning

Now, while there were 17 added tags, even more of them were removed, which no longer made sense to have them on Steam. This category is comprised of tags that no longer serve a good connection between games, were redundant against other tags, were too subjective, or were named after intellectual property.

Here are the 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

Now, the final list is comprised of just six different changes to a few tags. This is just to make it clearer about which tags serve which purpose, or repurposing tags that were hyper-specific to fit a new theme that's become prominent in the industry.

Here are the modified tags:

• Clicker has been renamed to Incremental
• Conversation has been renamed to Dialogue Heavy
• A few new tags have been added to match others in plural states: Dogs, Foxes, Vampires, Elves, Dwarves, and Assassins
• Pool was renamed to Billiards, since it was being added to things with swimming pools
• Jet was merged into Flight since the former was too hyper-specific
• Unforgiving was merged into Difficult, since they had a lot of overlap

This is just the latest in a long list of changes brought forth by Steam. It's worth noting that tags that were merged will remember account-specific "excluded" tags — if a tag that was excludedwas merged into one that wasn't, the new one will be excluded.