Steam tags: how the algorithm actually uses them

Your Steam tags decide which games yours gets shown next to — and that's most of the battle.

They aren't a describe-your-game formality and they aren't SEO keywords to stuff. They're the metadata Steam uses to categorize your game — its genre and sub-genre, but also its art style, viewpoint, themes, mood and mechanics — to match it to similar titles, and to figure out which players to recommend it to. Get them right and Steam quietly routes the correct audience to your page. Get them lazy or wrong and it routes the wrong crowd, or nobody.

Here's the useful part: Valve documents how this works, in plain language, in the Steam Tags documentation. Most "Steam algorithm" advice you'll read is folklore layered on top of that doc — and some of it is flatly contradicted by it. This post sticks to what Valve actually says, and what it means for how you tag. It's the deep dive on one section of the Steam store page — the tags field, which is the single biggest discovery lever on the whole page.

What tags actually do

Start here, because it reframes everything else. Tags aren't there to look tidy under your screenshots. Per Valve, the tags on your game determine four concrete things:

There's a fifth, quieter one that catches new releases off guard. When your game launches, Steam gives it baseline visibility through the New Releases queue — but Valve's Visibility on Steam doc says a title "can be filtered out based on associated tags" for a given user. So your tags gate even the free launch views. Tag your game badly and Steam has less reason to put it in front of the right people from day one.

What tags do not do is set a ranking. Your sales rank comes from players and purchases — Valve is explicit that store-page traffic, conversion rate and wishlists mostly aren't visibility factors, and you can't pay for placement. Tags decide where and to whom your game shows up. They point Steam at your audience; the audience does the ranking. Keep those two ideas separate and most tag folklore falls apart.

What Steam users see

Flip it to the player's side for a second. When Steam users browse a tag page, filter a search, or scroll a game's "More Like This" row, they're looking at tag-driven results — and your tags decide whether you're in them. Players can also narrow a search down to a handful of tags, or exclude the ones they never want to see. That cuts in your favour: accurate tags put you in front of the people hunting for exactly your kind of game, and quietly keep you away from the ones who'd bounce. Tags are machine-readable metadata — the discovery system reads them, not your marketing prose, the same reason text beats images for machines.

Only the top 20 count — and rarer beats common

Two numbers do most of the work here.

You need at least 5 tags to launch and Valve recommends up to 20. Here's the part people miss: only your top 20 are visible to users and used by Steam. You can have more applied, but tag number 21 onward is dead weight — it influences nothing. So the game isn't "collect as many tags as possible." It's "make your top 20 the right 20." And your top 5 should paint a clear picture of the game, because those double as its description.

Why rarer tags beat common ones

Now the fact worth memorising, in Valve's own framing: some of Steam's recommendation algorithms weight less-frequently used tags more than common ones. Tag your game "Action" and it does almost nothing, because nearly every game is tagged Action. Tag it "Party-Based RPG" and it does a lot, because far fewer games claim it — so it's a much sharper signal for matching you to the right players. Precision beats breadth. A specific, slightly rarer tag that's genuinely true of your game is worth more than three broad ones.

This is also why stuffing your top slots with "Indie" and "Singleplayer" is a waste. Valve's own Tag Wizard has a "Suggest Prioritization" feature that does one simple thing: it moves high-information tags like sub-genres up, and pushes redundant, low-information tags — Valve names "indie" and "singleplayer" specifically — down. If Valve's own tool demotes them, they don't belong at the top of your list.

Order matters — but overlap matters more

Order and overlap are two different mechanics, and it's worth knowing which one applies where.

Order: your own page and its filters

Order governs how your own page reads and which filters catch you. Your top 5 should paint a clear picture of the game, because those double as its description. And because some store filters prioritise the first 15 tags, you want those sorted by relevance — bury your defining sub-genre at position 18 and it still counts toward your top 20, but it's under-weighted and invisible to any filter that only reads the first 15. You control this order yourself in the Tag Wizard (Edit Store Page → Basic Info → Tags), dragging tags into priority order.

Overlap: recommendations and "More Like This"

Overlap governs recommendations and "More Like This" — and here Valve says order matters less than which tags you share with other games. If your game has "Open World" and "Fantasy", Steam is more likely to recommend it to players who've played other Open World Fantasy games. The more tags that overlap between two games, the stronger Steam's read that they're similar. So "More Like This" is built from the set of your top 20, by overlap, not by rank.

One honest caveat, because overlap isn't a pure meritocracy: "More Like This" has long leaned toward bigger, better-reviewed games in your genre rather than the niche title that shares your exact tags. Valve knows — back in 2019 it fixed a bug where top-rated games were dominating the "Similar by Tags" feed and widened the window it uses to judge popularity, and analysts who track Steam discovery say the tilt is smaller but not gone. So overlap gets your game considered for those slots; it doesn't guarantee you a seat next to a genre giant. Share tags with the games your player already loves — just don't expect to be planted next to the biggest one.

The practical upshot: your top few tags do double duty — they describe you and they anchor your strongest filter placements — so put your most specific, most accurate, slightly-rarer tags there. Then round out the rest of your 20 with every other tag that's genuinely true, because each one is another chance to overlap with a game your ideal player already loves.

You're not the only one tagging your game

How tags get applied

This surprises developers who think the tag field is theirs alone. Per Valve, tags can be applied by the developer, by players with non-limited accounts, and by Steam moderators. The community marks up your game alongside you — and those user-defined tags get mixed in with yours, with their weight rising as more players apply the same tag.

Mostly that's fine, and occasionally it's a gift: players sometimes surface an accurate tag you didn't think of. But it means you have to check back — a popular user-defined tag that doesn't quite fit can drift up your list and pull you toward the wrong audience. Players don't always tag in good faith, either: "Psychological Horror", for one, gets slapped on games that plainly aren't. Valve prunes from its side too — it has removed trademarked tags like Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer 40,000 and LEGO, and retired the catch-all "NSFW" and "Mature" tags in favour of specific content descriptors — but the community-flag threshold to auto-remove a bad tag is high, so cleaning up inaccurate tags on your own page is on you.

Editing tags on your store page

If players pile on a tag that doesn't fit — "family friendly" on a horror game, "2D" on a 3D game, to use Valve's examples — you can remove it two ways: step back through the Tag Wizard, or on your live store page click the "+" next to the tag list, hover the offending tag, and click the flag icon that appears. Handy to know: publishing your tags is a separate process from publishing the rest of your store page, so you can fix a tag without pushing other pending store changes live.

So tagging isn't a set-and-forget step at launch. It's worth revisiting every few months, and especially after any burst of new players, to make sure the top 20 still describe the game you actually made.

One thing you don't have to manage: Steam localizes your tags for you. Your top tag might read "RPG" to an English player and "Rollespil" to a Danish one — same tags, same order, just translated — so a player in another country browsing in their own language still finds you. You tag once; Steam handles the different-language versions.

The mistakes that bury a game

None of these are exotic. Each one is just the flip side of a mechanic above.

Notice the through-line: every mistake is a version of inaccuracy or laziness, and the fix is always the same — a complete, honest, well-ordered top 20.

Getting your tags right, briefly

Open the Tag Wizard, and think in layers rather than reaching for the obvious genre. (Don't confuse tags with the separate "Genre" checkboxes in your store setup — those power Steam's legacy navigation. Set them, but your actual top tags should be specific sub-genres, not the broad genre.) Valve's wizard walks you through each layer — pull one or two accurate tags from each:

• Genre & sub-genre — your broad type, and more importantly your most specific one
• Visual style & viewpoint — Pixel Graphics, Cute, Minimalist; First-Person, Top-Down, Isometric
• Themes & moods — Space, Fantasy, Funny, Relaxing
• Gameplay features — Procedural Generation, Resource Management, Physics

That range is the point: tags go well beyond genre, and a game described only as "Action" tells Steam almost nothing, while "Top-Down, Roguelike, Procedural Generation, Cute" tells it exactly who to show you to.

Name your most specific sub-genre first (Valve's example: Super Meat Boy is most precisely a "Precision Platformer", not just "Platformer" or "Action"). Then look at three or four games that are genuinely like yours and note which tags they share — those overlaps are exactly what will land you in each other's "More Like This". Order the whole set by relevance, keep the truest and rarest tags in your top five, and fill all 20 slots with tags that are actually true. Then come back in a few months and check what the community changed.

A reality check so you don't over-obsess: there's good evidence that launching with no tags — or lazy ones — tanks your visibility, but no public evidence that endlessly re-ordering an already-accurate set is a magic lever. As Steam-discovery analyst Simon Carless puts it, if your top tag is "Indie" you're throwing away your best slot on something non-descriptive. Get the set accurate and specific, put your sharpest tags first, and move on — that's where the return is.

That's the whole game. Tags aren't a keyword field you optimise — they're a description you make accurate. Steam does the rest: it reads your top 20, works out which games yours is like, and shows it to the people already playing those. Your only job is to make sure the picture your tags paint is the game you actually made.

Common questions

Sources

• Valve — Steam Tags (Steamworks documentation)
• Valve — Visibility on Steam
• Valve — Store Page, Building and Editing
• Simon Carless, GameDiscoverCo — "Are YOU prioritizing your Steam tags?" (independent Steam-discovery analysis)