Are you getting the most discoverability out of your Steam tags?
Steam allows you - and players - to add tags to your game to help with discoverability.
Your tags impact where and how your game will appear to potential customers on Steam.
Each game must have 5 tags - up to a maximum of 20.
While they’re pretty simple and easy to add (there’s even a Tag Wizard to help you),
getting the most out of your tags isn’t as straightforward as you might think.
In this video we’ll go over the basics of Steam tags, show you why they matter for game
discoverability, and finally take a look at Steam tagging tips from some bright minds
in the gamedev industry.
We are Ask Gamedev and this is Everything We Know About Steam Tags
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Ok let’s talk about Steam tag basics.
As we mentioned in the intro, you’ll need to add 5-20 tags to your game’s Steam store
page before you can publish it.
According to Steam’s documentation while they recommend using all 20, the top 5 tags
should paint a fairly clear picture of your game.
The tag order also determines the weight each tag has on your game.
There are hundreds of tags available, split into 13 categories:
* Top-level Genres * Genres
* Sub-Genres * Visuals & Viewpoint
* Themes & Moods * Features
* Players * Other Tags
* Software * Assessments
* Ratings etc.
* Hardware / Input * And Funding etc.
All of the available tags can be found in Steam’s documentation.
So with hundreds of tags across 13 categories, where does one begin?
Well first let's talk about your goal with defining your Steam tags.
The strategy is to pick relevant keywords that best describe your game.
It's important to remember that these tags are a key component of how Steam will show
your game to potential buyers.
The tags you pick with signal to Steam what types of users are likely to be interested
in your game.
Knowing that, it's important to pick tags that are accurate.
You may be tempted to pick terms that are broad and popular’, but keep in mind that
Steam will only surface your game to users that follow those genres for so long if users
aren’t clicking on your capsule image.
It's better to be hyper-focused and target tag keywords that you are more likely to ‘convert’
with.
This approach will keep the Steam algorithm incentivized to keep showing your game on
their pages.
Now that we know our goal, the next thing you should do is take a look at similar titles.
You know your game more than anybody else, so you probably have a good idea of what games
inspired it.
Take a look at those games and write down their tags - pay special attention to the
top 5 tags of each game.
You want your game to share similarities in tags with those titles to signal to Steam
that players of those titles may be interested in your game.
Once you have a handle of what tags are in your realm of similar titles, it’s time
to hit Steam’s Tag Wizard.
The wizard will walk you through the process of choosing and weighting the right tags,
step by step.
Later in the video we’ll go through the Steam Wizard together.
First let’s talk about the whole point of the tag wizard exercise.
We know Steam uses the tagging system to get a better understanding of what your game is
and who may like it - but where specifically do you benefit from this?
How do tags actually help with discoverability?
Well let’s check out the many different ways:
* First off there’s Steam’s recommendations.
If you’re logged into Steam and you check out the main store page you’ll notice Steam
is pushing games specific to you.
There’s the Discovery Queue - a custom playlist of games Steam thinks you’ll like.
There’s the “Players Like You Love” carousel - these games are recommended based
on the games you’ve played (specifically the tags of the games that you’ve played).
And there’s also game recommendations based on specific games you’ve played or games
you've added to your wishlist.
As you scroll down through the main page you’ll find an endless amount of recommendations.
Tags are a huge factor in this recommendation process.
* Next there’s the “More Like This” section.
Each game page, including yours, has a “More Like This” section that features games that
Steam thinks are similar.
Steam uses your Top 20 tags to figure out what pages you should appear on, and which
games should appear on yours.
Here’s a quick tip: Use the website steamlikes.com to see which games appear on a particular
game’s “more like this” section, and vice-versa.
* Finally, users are able to browse and search for titles by tag.
Not only that, they can use tags as filters when browsing games.
So if I’m looking for, say, a platformer, that’s 2D, and has robots - I should be
able to find a number of titles that match using Steam’s narrow by tag feature.
In addition to all of this, Steam recently introduced smarter tag-based searches with
Query Expansion.
With Query Expansion, Steam is trying to get search to treat tags more like a human would.
Here’s a quick example of how it works: Say you have an RTS game.
Tags you could use for this would be “RTS”, “Real-Time”, and “Strategy”.
What if you only had the “RTS” tag?
You’d be missed when users search for “Real-time” and “Strategy” games.
Query Expansion fixes that.
You can try out this system today by visiting Steam Labs Experiment 4.1: Search with Expanded
Tags.
We’ll leave a link in the description
Ok so we know what tags are, what they do, and how we can benefit from them.
This is about as far as Steam’s documentation will take us.
How do we maximize our game’s discoverability and avoid common pitfalls?
For that, let’s turn to the experts.
The website and mailing list howtomarketagame.com by Chris Zukowski is a fantastic resource
and has a number of great articles on Steam tags.
A recent post, STEAM 101: HOW TO TAG YOUR GAME, had a number of eye-opening tips.
We’ll leave a link to the full article in the description.
We won’t spoil it all, but here are three tips from the article that we thought were
really useful.
In no particular order:
1.
Don’t use the tag “indie”.
If Chris sees the tag “indie” on a game’s page, it’s a clear signal to him that their
tagging needs work.
Why?
He calls tags like this Empty Calorie Tags - the group also includes the tags Casual,
Adventure, and Action.
Basically these tags are so common that adding them wouldn’t provide much of a benefit
for your game’s discovery.
It’s even worse if you use them as one of your top 5 tags as they’d be taking the
spot of a more descriptive tag.
2.
Another type of tag to avoid are what Chris refers to as poison pill tags.
Poison pill tags are tags that are divisive and may turn people off from your game quickly.
Some of the tags Chris mentions are Gore, Violent and Blood.
These aren’t tags you should add lightly.
Only use these tags if they are the focus of your game.
And lastly, 3.
Refresh your tags every 2 to 3 months.
You should do this for two reasons.
First, Steam regularly adds new tags.
They might add a tag that better describes your game.
Second, because users can tag your game too, you should be getting in there and making
sure the tags added are relevant and don’t include any Empty Calorie or Poison Pill tags.
You can remove these tags with the tag wizard.
Make sure to check out the article for more tips.
Chris actually wrote a follow up article where he dives deeper into different genre tags.
We’ll leave a link to that in the description as well.
How about a tip directly from Valve?
In 2019, at Melbourne International Games Week Valve's Molly Carroll shared tips for
launching a game on Steam.
What did she say about tags?
She mentioned that most developers lack imagination when it came to tags, in that they stopped
adding tags at the genre level.
Her advice was to keep narrowing your tags down and coming up with tags based on important
features (for example, Character Customization).
She also mentioned that the first 15 tags will drive search recommendations throughout
the store.
Let’s do an example.
Let’s take what we learned, and try it out.
Say we’re making a game featuring Ask Gamedev’s unofficial mascot, Super Teal Robot.
It would be a robot-themed 2D action platformer that features linear levels, epic boss battles
and a variety of weapons.
Step 1: Figure out what games are most similar to your title.
Some of the games that inspire Super Teal Robot are Mega Man 11, Mighty No. 9, and Shovel
Knight.
Step 2: Look at the tags of the similar titles and compile them - paying more attention to
each tag’s top 5.
Ok so we’re going to go to each one’s Steam page, and write down their tags.
From the 3 titles we have 58 tags to work with.
Step 3: Pair down the tag list.
With the 58 tags, let’s see which ones show up the most.
We’ll use a combination of the most common tags and tags that we think will be relevant
to our game.
There are 8 tags that showed up on all 3 games: * Platformer (which was also in the top 5
of all 3) * Sidescroller
* Action * Single player
* Retro * Difficult
* Great Soundtrack * and 2D
There are 8 tags that showed up twice: * Anime
* Comedy * Indie
* Kickstarter * Robots
* Sci-Fi * 2.5D
* Adventure
Of these 16 tags, we can take away 2.5D and Kickstarter and they aren’t relevant.
Step 4.
Remove empty calorie tags and poison pill tags.
* In Chris’ article he mentions Action, Indie, and Adventure as empty calorie tags.
Indie needs to go.
For Action and Adventure, we’ll have to add them but we’ll put them at the back
of the list.
* He also mentions anime as a potential poison pill tag - let’s take that out too.
With our list paired down, we’re ready for Step 5: Use Steam’s tag wizard.
So we’ve got: * Platformer
* Sidescroller * Single player
* Retro * Difficult
* Great Soundtrack * 2D
* Comedy * Robots
* Sci-Fi Let’s start up the tag wizard and see how
many we can add.
To open the Tag Wizard head to your Steam Dashboard, click edit store page, then look
for the “Tag My Title” button.
* Ok here it is - click begin.
* First it starts off with the “Top-Level Genres”.
Let’s click Adventure and Action.
We’ll put them lower on the list later.
* Next we have “Genres”.
We’re going to add Platformer * Now “Sub-Genres”.
We’ll add Side Scroller * For “Visuals & Viewpoint” we’ll add
2D * For “Themes & Moods” we have a bunch.
Let’s add Comedy, Robots, Retro & Sci-fi * Under “Features”, let’s take Valve’s
advice and pick some features important to us - how about character customization?
* “Players” is pretty straightforward.
We’re going with Singleplayer.
Because this tag is so broad, we’ll make sure to deprioritize it.
* In the “What Else?”
section, we can search for more tags to add.
Let’s add Difficult.
* Next you’ll be shown a list of tags that users have added.
Make sure to uncheck Indie.
Click next.
* And now the page we’ve been waiting for.
Steam will generate a list of similarly tagged games.
Let’s take a look at what we’ve got: * Mega Man 11
* 3 more Mega Man games * Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures
* Shovel Knight Treasure Trove * Code Arcturus
* And Mighty No. 9 It’s a success!
Our 3 target games are on the list!
* This is also the screen where you pick your tag order.
Don’t forget: the higher your tag is on this list, the more weight Steam will give
it.
Let’s re-order the tags and see what other results we can get.
We’ll move the broad tags to the end and bring more narrow tags up front.
With a little rearranging we’ve managed to bring Mighty No. 9 closer in.
* As a comparison let’s see what the suggested prioritization would look like.
Let’s click the suggested prioritization button.
As you can see we’ve lost one of our target games, Shovel Knight!
That’s why it’s important to put some strategy into your tag order.
* Now there’s nothing left to do but go back to our custom order and click publish.
So if we do everything right, will we start seeing results right away?
The answer to that is less clear.
Simon Carless of the Game Discoverability Now!
newsletter writes that there are a number of factors the algorithm does take into account
including sales and reviews.
One thing he states that is absolutely clear though is that using “indie” as your top
tag is a waste.
So if there is one thing that you can take away from this video - it’s please stop
using “indie” to tag your game on Steam.
Thanks for watching!
For more Ask Gamedev check this video for more Steam tips or this playlist on indie
game marketing.