Tags pick your neighbours, not your description

The biggest mistake made when filling in tags is trying to explain the game. Tags do not describe your game, they largely pick who you get put in front of.

You have 20 slots and you have to use all of them well. The first 5 show on your store page and those are the ones that carry the most weight, and the order of the 20 decides which browse and search pages you turn up on. A tag that is used rarely also counts for more than one that is used a lot, so putting your most niche tags between 5 and 10 makes the most sense.

If you put Indie at the top you are spending your heaviest slot on a word that says nothing. Roguelike Deckbuilder puts you next to your peers, Indie puts you nowhere. This is also the first thing Zukowski tells you to learn.

Another danger is that a game with the wrong tags can walk into a very picky subculture without noticing. A player always knows more about the genre he plays than you do, he arrives with the wrong expectation and does not like it. The more niche the audience, the pickier and the louder it is. So the wrong tag does not bring you few players, it brings you the wrong players.

The more troublesome part is the trace that audience leaves in the algorithm. If the man who sees your page does not wishlist it and does not buy it, Steam reads that as there being no interest in your game. So showing up in front of the wrong audience does not just lose you that day’s sales, it also lowers the traffic you are given the next day.

You are doing the same arithmetic with words as well. The comparison you set up in the short description and in About This Game works on a similar mechanism to a tag, it decides who comes and what they come expecting. The broader the comparison, the more people come, and at the same time the more wrong people come. So in the first sentences you need to give a clear picture of what the game is.

The ones who come and do not buy leave you silence, the ones who buy do not like it and write it in a review. So the wrong audience hits you from both sides at once, the signal that should come never comes and the signal that does come is negative.

I went through a lot of this with my own game. I compared Metal Thunder to the AC-130 mission in Call of Duty, the sentence worked and it made me visible, but today some of my negative reviews still make that comparison. People are asking where their CoD is.

The More Like This shelf is not something you can guarantee. But it is one of the things that drives sales. Cleared Hot came out last November, and Drone Sector last month. Both are similar to Metal Thunder and both are successful games. And because I am at the front of their More Like This sections, I got very good visibility and conversion.

Getting your tags perfect makes nobody rich, but getting them wrong sinks you. A tag is not a growth lever, it is a field for the algorithm to recognise you by.

So what do you do? First pick yourself 5 competitors, not the best sellers, games that share the same audience as you. If you copy the best seller’s tags you do not appear next to it, you just sit at the very bottom of that shelf. The ideal is games between 500 and 1000 reviews.

Then, while you are ordering your tags in Steamworks, look at the Similarly Tagged Games list right underneath. If those five games you picked show up in the list your tags are right, if they do not, change the order and look again.

Players can also add tags, and a tag you never put there can climb to the top over time. Run the Tag Wizard once a month, is the top 20 still the 20 you picked?

Tags do not describe your game, they decide who will judge it.