Tags provide valuable information
Steam users want to quickly learn about your game when browsing the store, and tags are a great tool to help them do so. Tagging your title gives Steam vital information in determining where your game is displayed to customers. We recently began requiring at least 5 tags be applied to a title before its launch on Steam.
Aside from displaying useful information on the game pages themselves, tags provide valuable information when paired with powerful search and browse tools that make them accessible.
More robust tags help 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
In our recent Search experiment, we have expressed and begun to leverage relationships between tags and related metadata. So now is a great time to revisit the tags associated with your titles.
Introducing the Tag Wizard
The new Steamworks Tag Wizard, now in Beta for all Steamworks users, is designed to further improve the coverage and quality of tag information as applied across the catalog, thus making Steam’s discovery and recommendation systems more robust.
An initial analysis of the tags currently applied across the catalog shows a common failure to apply genre and sub-genre tags to titles – a level of specificity customers seek when shopping. In the new wizard, we’ve introduced a proposed hierarchy of genres and other tag classifications.
The Tag Wizard steps a Steamworks user through a series of screens designed to quickly capture a breadth of tags relevant to their title, across a set of increasingly specific categories:
Top-Level Genres,
Genres,
Sub-Genres,
Visuals & View Points,
Themes & Moods,
Features,
Players and more. The wizard leverages the information entered thus far, comparing it to similarly tagged titles in our catalog, and highlights those which are most likely relevant in each subsequent step.
The Tag Wizard also suggests any tags discovered in your title’s store page description - another common omission we discovered upon analysis of the catalog. Additionally, any tags your users have applied in the Store are also suggested for your consideration. Lastly, the wizard enables ranking of the relative importance of a game’s tags for the purposes of weighting them, which is information that Steam leverages in various places like Search and
More Like This recommendations.
If a title already has tags applied, the user of the Tag Wizard may discover which types of tags may be missing from their title’s tag profile, verify and rank existing tags, and step through a series of screens to improve it.
Tag your titles today!
[UWSL]We've updated the Tag Wizard[/UWSL] based on feedback from an initial set of Beta testers.
So tag your titles today and give customers valuable information, that they may connect with your games on Steam and become fast fans. You’ll discover the Tag Wizard in Steamworks. Look for it in the
Store Presence /
Edit Store Page /
Basic Info section, under
Tags, and
[UWSL]please share your feedback[/UWSL] once you've given it a whirl.
For a list of titles most in need of attention, visit your
[UWSL]Steamworks Recommended Actions[/UWSL] page, where you’ll find links to the Tag Wizard per title you manage.