Almost three dozen game tags were removed from Steam, but new ones were added in their place
From time to time, Valve optimizes the user tagging system in Steam, removing obsolete tags or adding new ones. This time, the company decided to do both.
Ghost of Tsushima
As reported by Valve, they have currently removed a total of 28 tags from the store. In particular, tags such as “for adults,” “masterpiece,” “roguelike-metroidvania,” Kickstarter, and Dungeons & Dragons were among those cleaned out. According to the company, there are alternative options for most of these that more accurately describe games, and some are simply too subjective.
Additionally, Valve has merged some existing tags to "eliminate redundancy." As a result, for example, the "flight simulators" tag has been combined with the "flying" tag, while the "hardcore" tag has been merged with the "challenging" tag.
Meanwhile, there are 17 new tags added. Among them are Bullet Heaven, Cleaning, Decorating, Wuxia, Samurai, Capybaras, and Poker. Notably, at least for now, all of them are only in English, but it's possible that versions of these tags in other languages will appear later in Steam.
In the announcement about the changes, Valve also shared some statistics. The company revealed that the title of the most popular tag on Steam currently belongs to “single-player,” which is assigned to 62% of games. The second most widespread is the “indie” tag, which appears on 53% of games.