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The evolution of Steam tags (& why we dig 'em!)
While suggestions solely based on media you’ve consumed also work well, I do think discovery via tags can be super valuable, especially on a platform that approaches 100,000 games.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
Well, it’s time for a return to the GameDiscoverCo newsletter, this fair Wednesday. This time out, we’ve got two medium-sized ‘lead’ articles, rather than one gigantic one - since there’s a lot of different interesting things to cover.
Anyhow, lots to cover, so let’s get to it - before we get too distracted by the new, free Dicey Dungeons ‘Reunion’ DLC*. (*Which is really good, and you should definitely play.)
Steam tags: recent additions, and why they work…
So we started looking into the recent history of Steam tags - which you can browse on Steam itself, or via SteamDB for released games, and search individually via the GameDiscoverCo Plus back end for unreleased Steam games by tag.
This was inspired by the fact that ‘Cozy’ & ‘Wholesome’ are now Steam tags. (People with wholesome games, go add the tag, if your community hasn’t already!) But it got us wondering - what other tags have been added recently that we haven’t spotted?
We went on a bit of a trek, and Wok (who makes a lot of Steam analysis tools on Github) was kind enough to pass along his data on all Steam tags added since August 2019 (Pastebin link). You can see a lot of more specific and more consequential subgenres appeared in this timeframe. Summing those genre tags up for you all: