Ah Valve. I’m not sure you guys completely thought this one through. But let’s start at the beginning: Tagging gives Steam customers the ability to “Tag” any title with genres, themes, attributes, or any other term or phrase. The most popular tags on any given product will be displayed on the Steam page for that title and allow users to easily find other products associated with that same tag.
Sounds great right? Except that a lot of people online are, to be nice and politically incorrect, complete idiots and have already started tagging games with all sorts of nonsense. Is the ability to browse through a list of games tagged “Feeding” or “#YOLO” really all that useful? As illustrated in the screenshot of the tags currently associated with Dota 2 – some of the tags are really of questionable use at best. Russians? Soviet Union? Feeding? It’s more an indication of problems and toxic elements in the community of said game than anything else.
Valve additionally launched a related product section, which they say will make it easy to browse by any of the frequently used tags assigned by the community.
“As the catalog of products available on Steam continues to grow, we want to ensure that it is easy for customers to find the particular types of games or software they are looking for,” says Al Farnsworth of Valve. “With this new feature, we are providing another powerful tool to help organize and browse products on Steam.”
I’m somewhat sceptic. Whilst the intention is nice, I’m not sure some of the tags will be nice, and it’s yet another thing Valve will need to police and subsequently result in customers being banned. I’d rather have seen a better way of navigating the store and apply filters than a community driven tagging system. But hey, that’s me.
User-defined Tagging is available in beta form immediately and is accessible to all Steam users.
For more information, please visit http://store.steampowered.com/tag