Steam Tags No Longer in Beta; Gets New Features

After introducing Steam Tags back in February, Valve has announced the feature has now left beta. The company announced that since it introduced the feature, users have applied tags more than "4 million times and across almost every product in the Steam catalogue."

With Steam Tags, users can 'tag' any game or software with genres, themes, attributes, or any other term or phrase that would help other users find similar products.

In a news post on Steam community forums, Valve detailed the changes that have come to the Steam platform with the addition of tags. The 'More like this' suggestions on a product page have been improved by the addition of tags, says the company, helping users find which games are "most closely related thematically and stylistically."

The company added that Steam Tags are also useful for making specific recommendations to users based on the games they have recently played, thus helping the company offer more relevant suggestions on the 'Recommended for you' page. Valve said that while categorisation by genre has been present for a while, their usage was 'far too broad to be useful' to find games that are quite similar.

Valve says both these sections - 'More like this' and 'Recommended for you' - have seen a dramatic increase in traffic and clicks on game titles. The company also revealed that it had made some changes to the Tags platform since its beta release in February, and one of those was to merge the separate pools of tags for each language - initially introduced with the assumption that tags in a language might also incorporate 'cultural differences' that would hard to translate, and so were ideally meant for speakers of that language only.

The company said "the downside of having separate pools of tags outweighs any positives that may be possible. Most languages, which have fewer Steam users than English, ended up with many fewer tags applied and a higher percentage of bad data from the tags (inappropriate tags, jokes, etc.)." Tags in different languages are now merged, translated by community translators.

Another change to Steam Tags detailed by the company is how similar tags get merged together and the "threshold at which new tags become part of the system." Valve says how useful a tag is depends how many people agree it should be applied to a specific game, and how accurately it associates the games it is applied to. Unhelpful tags are those that users don't agree upon, or are too generic to be used to categorise.

Working on the useful tags, Valve says it figured there were several tags being applied that essentially spelling or phrasal variations - these tags (e.g., modding, mod-friendly) have now been combined, with a single tag replacing the similar tags or variations. When a variation is added, what will actually be displayed is the archetypical tag (in this case, moddable).