Steam finally solved gaming’s trickiest genre name

On Monday, Valve announced that its PC storefront has been updated with new game tags after two years of remaining stagnant. 17 new game tags — essentially granular genre names — were added to Steam, and nearly twice as many tags were removed from the platform. These changes reflect a number of industry trends, both in terms of what’s popular and what’s fallen out of fashion. And at least one of the inclusions is likely to settle ongoing debates about a specific category of game.

Vampire Survivors took the gaming world by storm in 2021, and since then, the action roguelite has inspired a number of games with a similar frenetic ethos, including officially licensed fare like Warhammer Survivors. These are games where there are a thousand things happening at once, as the player collects more wacky upgrades and the screen starts overflowing with enemies. So far, most of us have referred to these games with clunky monikers, like “Vampire Survivor-likes” or simply “survivor-like” — similar to how games like Rogue, Metroid, and Dark Souls all but defined their own genres.

Valve has decided that the best, most elegant name for it should be “Bullet Heaven.” Valve describes this type of game as “The opposite of Bullet Hell; Focus on upgrades while automatically attacking hordes of enemies.” While Valve certainly didn’t invent the term Bullet Heaven, it’s a clever name for the genre that avoids focusing on a brand name.

Image: Poncle

Other notable tag inclusions are Desktop Companion (games that keep you company while you do other things), Wuxia, Xianxia, and… Capybaras? “The largest and possibly most adorable rodent species,” the tag reads. (There certainly are a lot of capybaras on Steam.)

Another curious assortment of tags is Cleaning, Organizing, and Decorating. There’s probably a lot of overlap between these game types, but the appeal of each can offer a distinct experience. You don’t play PowerWash Simulator for the same reason you might play the game where you index your shameful Steam library.

Valve’s also removed 27 tags, which sounds like a lot until you see what they are. Tags like “America,” “Illuminati,” and “Masterpiece” likely create more problems than they solve. The whole point of this Steam system is to help players find more games that they like. Still, some removals such as “Lego” and “Games Workshop” could raise some eyebrows, though many of the removals appear to be focused on removing redundant brand names.

Steam has also updated a handful of tags so that they better reflect a game’s content. “‘Clicker’ has been renamed into ‘Incremental’ to capture the broader essence of games that focus on numbers going up,” Valve explained.

You can peruse the entire list of tag additions, removals, and tweaks here.