Steam Tags Are Doing More Work Than Your Trailer: How to Pick the 20 That Actually Get You Seen

Most devs pick their Steam tags in about a minute, breezing through the process to get to more interesting things (like creating 30 sizes of the same logo for art! - joking). Yet Tags do more of the discovery work than almost anything else on your page, and they’re the cheapest thing to fix.

The problem: your store page is fine, it’s just that nobody is seeing it

A good store page doesn’t get you traffic, it converts traffic. Something else has to put your game in front of a player first, and on Steam that something is mostly the algorithm reading your tags and deciding which discovery queue and which tag browse page your game belongs in.

If your tags are vague, generic, or wrong for what your game actually is, Steam shows your page to the wrong people. Those people don’t wishlist, Steam reads that as weak interest, and it shows the page to fewer people next time. It’s a feedback loop, and it starts with the words under your title that most people fill in as an afterthought.

What tags actually do on Steam

Steam uses your tags for three separate jobs, and it helps to know which one you’re aiming at.

The discovery queue. This is the personalized “games you might like” feed Steam shows returning users. It’s built from a player’s play history and wishlist, matched against tags. With the right tags, the right audience finds you here without searching for anything.

“More Like This” panels. These show up on other games’ store pages, and they’re pure tag-matching. If your game shares enough tags with another popular title in your space, you can appear on that title’s page. That’s some of the best traffic you can get, because the player already proved they like this kind of game.

Tag browse pages. Every tag has its own page (store.steampowered.com/tag/[tagname]) where players filter by genre or feature. Fewer people browse this way than land in it via search or a queue, but the ones who do are hunting for exactly what the tag says.

All three read the same list. So, if you get the list wrong, you’re basically invisible in all three at once.

Why tag order matters

Steam lets you select up to 20 tags, and they aren’t weighted equally. The tags near the top of your list carry a lot more weight than the ones at the bottom. Valve hasn’t published the exact math, but the usual advice is to treat your first five to seven tags as your real genre definition and everything after that as supporting detail.

So the order you drag those tags into isn’t cosmetic. If “Pixel Graphics” is tag one and “JRPG” is tag fifteen, Steam leans toward classifying you as a pixel art game first and a JRPG a distant second, even when JRPG is the thing that actually sells your game.

The three kinds of tags you need: genre, mechanic, and vibe

A solid tag list isn’t twenty versions of the same idea. It’s a mix of three types doing three different jobs.

Genre tags tell Steam what shelf you’re on: RPG, Metroidvania, Roguelike, Turn-Based Strategy. These are your biggest, most competitive tags. You need a couple, but every game in your space already has them.
Mechanic tags describe what the player actually does: Turn-Based Combat, Crafting, Base Building, Deckbuilding. These are more specific and do most of the work in “More Like This,” because they match games on function rather than category.
Vibe tags describe the feeling or setting: Atmospheric, Cozy, Dark Fantasy, Lovecraftian. These matter more than they sound like they should, because a lot of players browse by mood rather than mechanic.

A list that’s all genre tags reads as generic. A list that’s all vibe tags reads as vague. Use all three, weighted toward whichever one is your strongest hook.

Step 1: build a competitor list of 10 games players would shelve next to yours

Open a spreadsheet. List ten games that a player who wishlists yours would also plausibly wishlist. Not your favorite games, and not your inspirations if they don’t match tonally, but games occupying the same shelf. Mix in a couple of recent releases and a couple of established hits, because tag logic changes and you want to compare both.

Step 2: pull their tags and count what repeats

Visit each game’s store page and note its full tag list, in order. You can also cross-check with SteamDB, which mirrors a lot of this metadata and is a fast way to compare several games side by side without twenty browser tabs. Put every tag from every game into one sheet, then count frequency. The tags that show up on eight or nine of your ten competitors are the ones that define your genre, and those go near the top of your own list. The ones that show up once or twice are either niche differentiators or noise, and you’ll sort those out next.

Step 3: cut the tags that describe you but don’t describe what players search for

This is the step most devs skip. Go through your draft list and ask, honestly, whether each tag is something a player would type into a search bar or click while browsing, or something that’s just technically true of your game.

“Singleplayer” is almost always true and almost never useful as a top-slot tag, because it doesn’t separate you from anything. “Story Rich” is fine if your game really leans on narrative, but if you added it out of habit, drop it for something more specific. Ask of every tag: does this help Steam route the right player to me, or is it just accurate?

Step 4: fill the remaining slots with specific tags, not broad ones

Once your core genre and mechanic tags are locked in near the top, use the remaining slots on specific tags rather than broader synonyms of what you already have. Having both “Turn-Based Tactics” and “Turn-Based Strategy” wastes a slot. Pick the one that matches you more precisely and use the other for something like “Party-Based RPG” or “Grid-Based Movement” that adds new information.

Specific tags also have less competition. “RPG” has an enormous number of games attached to it. “Turn-Based JRPG” is a much smaller pool, and being visible in a small pool beats being buried in a huge one.

What the Tag Wizard does and doesn’t do

Steamworks has a Tag Wizard that walks you through picking tags by category: top-level genres, genres, sub-genres, visuals and viewpoint, themes and moods, features, players. Use it. It’s a better interface than a blank list, and it stops you leaving a whole category empty.

What it won’t do is tell you a tag is wrong. When I opened it on my own page, it had “2D Platformer” and “Side Scroller” filed neatly under Sub-Genres, for a game that stopped having side-scrolling sections a long time ago. It sorted them correctly. It has no way to know the game changed.

One thing to watch: tags you add during the wizard land at the bottom of your list in the order you picked them, so a strong mechanic tag added late can end up below filler you set months ago. You can drag them into order after finishing the wizard, and it’s worth doing.

The division of labor is straightforward. The wizard handles structure. Deciding which tags belong is still the competitor pass above, and that part is still yours.

Worked example: my own store page

My game, Crown Code Chronicles, has a Steam page up as Coming Soon. It’s also a fair example of a page that hadn’t had this pass done to it. The trailer is out of date, almost all the assets need replacing, and the tags were what I picked when I first set the page up rather than after giving it serious thought.

Here’s what was on it:

JRPG, Time Travel, Party-Based RPG, Turn-Based Combat, Story Rich, RPG, Adventure, 2D Platformer, Side Scroller, Fantasy, Futuristic, Magic, Pixel Graphics, Indie, 2D, Old School, Singleplayer

Some of that is doing real work. JRPG, Turn-Based Combat, Party-Based RPG and Story Rich all describe what the game is, and they’re what someone types when they know what they want.

Some of it is filler. “Indie” and “2D” apply to so many games that they narrow nothing. “Adventure” overlaps ground “JRPG” already covers. “Old School” is vague in the same way “Retro” is, and “Pixel Graphics” says it better.

Then there’s the pair that was flatly wrong. “2D Platformer” and “Side Scroller” describe a different genre than the rest of the list. The game had side-scrolling sections once and doesn’t anymore, and the tags outlived the design. They sat there telling Steam to show a turn-based JRPG to people browsing for platformers.

That’s worse than a tag doing nothing. A wishlist from someone expecting a platformer won’t convert, and it teaches the algorithm the wrong thing about who my audience is.

It’s also the most common version of this problem. Tags get set once, early, when the game is a different game, and nobody revisits them. Mine sat through a genre change.

So I cut “2D Platformer,” “Side Scroller,” and “2D,” and added “Turn-Based Tactics,” “2.5D,” and “Emotional.” Three slots that were pointing the wrong way now describe the combat, the art, and the tone.

If you’re doing your own pixel art and want a sense of where Aseprite fits against other tools, this comparison of pixel art software for game dev is worth a read.

The fastest way to check your tags worked

Traffic Breakdown takes weeks to say anything. There’s a check you can do the same day: scroll down your own store page to “Similarly Tagged Games.”

That row is Steam telling you which neighborhood your tags put you in. If those games are the ones a player would shelve next to yours, your tags describe the game you actually made. If they’re a genre away, something in your list is pulling in the wrong direction.

After the changes above, mine came back with Another Eden, Chrono Cross, Octopath Traveler II, Digimon Story: Time Stranger, Start Again: A Prologue, and a run of Dragon Quest titles.

That’s a useful result for two reasons. The turn-based party JRPGs are the obvious core, so the genre tags are doing their job. But Another Eden, Chrono Cross and Start Again all involve time travel, which means “Time Travel” at slot two is earning its place rather than sitting there as flavor. And Octopath Traveler II showing up means the 2.5D tag connected to something real.

I didn’t think to look at that row before I made the changes, which I regret, because I’d have liked the before-and-after. Check yours first if you’re about to do this.

Handling player-applied tags and when to moderate them

Once your game is live, players can add their own tags, and those get folded into your page’s tag weighting over time alongside the ones you set. Most of the time this is harmless or useful, because players sometimes surface an accurate descriptor you missed. Occasionally it’s a joke tag, or one someone is using to make a point about the game. Steam gives developers limited moderation tools over which tags can be added to their page, and it’s worth checking those settings after launch rather than assuming your original list is locked in forever.

How to check if it worked: reading your Traffic Breakdown

Steamworks gives you a Traffic Breakdown report in your app’s dashboard showing where visits to your store page came from, broken down by source, including discovery queue and tag browse. Check this a few weeks after making tag changes, not the next day. Discovery queue placement takes time to shift, and a single day of data is mostly noise.

If you want a rougher, faster read on how your tags compare to similar games in terms of visibility and wishlist conversion, a tool like Gamalytic aggregates public Steam data and can give you a sense of where you sit against comparable titles. Treat any third-party estimate as directional rather than exact.

What I’d avoid: tag stuffing, joke tags, and copying a breakout hit

A few traps that are easy to fall into:

Tag stuffing. Filling all 20 slots with every tag that’s technically true, rather than the 15 or so that actually matter, dilutes your signal. Steam’s algorithm works better with a focused list than a maximal one.

Joke tags and meme tags. They’re fun in your Discord and useless on your store page. If a tag doesn’t help a stranger who’s never heard of your game find it, it doesn’t belong in your top 20.

Copying a breakout hit’s exact tag list. If a massive hit shares your genre, some overlap is fine and expected. But copying their full list assumes their audience maps cleanly onto yours, and it usually doesn’t. You end up competing directly against a much bigger, better-known game for the same discovery slots instead of finding your own smaller, better-matched audience.

Do this week: the checklist

Check your Steamworks Traffic Breakdown now, and look at your “Similarly Tagged Games” row, so you have a baseline before anything changes
List 10 competitor games a player would shelve next to yours
Pull their full tag lists and count what repeats across most of them
Cut any tag on your current page that’s true but not searchable
Reorder your remaining tags so genre and mechanic tags sit in the first 5-7 slots
Fill leftover slots with specific tags instead of broader duplicates
Check the Similarly Tagged Games row again once the changes are live
Set a reminder to check Traffic Breakdown again in three to four weeks, not tomorrow

If you want more on how the practical, learn-by-doing side of building a game actually goes, the author spotlight on how I got into software and game making covers the longer version of that path.