Valve’s Steam service has been updated with a new tagging system, which was introduced today (February 13). This new system will make it easier for players to find specific characteristics of a game, and present them with findings relevant or related to said tag. What’s more, the system also gives players the opportunity to tag said games with relevant or related characteristics.
By visiting the Store Page, you can apply tags to your favorite games or software that you think are appropriate or relevant to the title, and tags that are frequently used will become featured tags. Furthermore, this new system is touted to help everyone discover new games through a new set of genres, themes, attributes and characteristics as defined by you and the Steam community.
The tagging system itself works similar to the tags you’d put on videos on YouTube; you can apply your own tag to the title you’re tagging, or opt to use other tags that have already been suggested for that title. For example, you can tag a genre as an “FPS”, or a theme as “Military”, or a characteristic such as “Difficult”. What’s quite liberal of this system is that you’re free to come up with entirely new tags to categorize titles with.
Another thing that’s quite interesting with this new system is that you can tag in different languages, which means that the tags will be categorized by the language they are entered in. For example, if you set Steam to another language, you’ll see popular tags applied by other Steam users who use that set language.
Filtering appears to be an easy process as well, as you’ll be able to browse titles by tag and new filtering controls. The filtering controls in question allow you to filter the tags you want to find, like finding a singleplayer game that runs on Linux and has Full Controller Support for example.
Steam’s new tagging system is currently in Beta. For more information, you can check out the tag system’s FAQ here .