We all love playing games with our friends, and it would be _really_ helpful to be able to search for games based on the maximum number of players the game supports and the type of multiplayer gaming. Steam's current tags all you to "Narrow by number of players", only it doesn't really, and the tags are confusing & overlapping while missing some critical ones. The options the store currently has are:
- Single-player
- Multi-player
- PvP
- Online PvP
- LAN PvP
- Shared/ Split Screen PvP
- Co-op
- Online Co-op
- LAN Co-op
- Shared/ Split Screen Co-op
- Shared/ Split Screen
- Cross-Platform Multiplayer
With some users defined tags including:
- 4 Player Local
- Local Multiplayer
- Local Co-op
- Massively Multiplayer
- Co-op Campaign
- PvE

Do we really need to primarily differentiate between Online & LAN multiplayer? Why have 8 tags for PvP and Co-op? Do you really need Shared/ Split Screen Co-op and PvP tags when you have the tag separately? It hinders searching – you want a Co-op game, but you need to search for 4 different tags in case the game has used LAN or Online Co-op instead of just Co-op.

Plus its missing some really important information – mainly player count. Got 5 people and what to know what you can play together? You can’t. I don’t know if tags are the best way of solving this issue, but having to scroll through every game description to see if they’ve included the max number of players is a pain when searching. Why is the information not clearly included somewhere obvious? The choices of multiplayer numbers used to quite restrictive – 2 or 4 local, online shooters depending on the server, or massively multiplayer. But now you get anything - I’ve seen 2/3/4/5/6/8/10/ then anything up to 100 (and more for MMOs, but numbers are kind of irrelevant there), and we need a way to differentiate between them.

So I’d suggest reworking the tags into the following list:
- Singleplayer
- Multiplayer
- PvP
- PvE
- Co-op
- Multi-player Campaign
- Online
- Offline
- Local Multiplayer
- Shared/ Split Screen
- Cross-Platform Multiplayer

A lot of the existing tags can be moved to this and then removed (eg. Shared/ Split Screen PvP tagged to Shared/ Split Screen and PvP, then delete the old tag). Items can be combined in the search to give more flexibility (eg. Local Multiplayer and Co-op to find a local Local Co-op game). It would I think be good to separate Shared/ Split Screen, but this can’t be scripted.

And then for numbers, if doing tags you would needs something like:
- 2 Player Max
- 3 Player Max
- 4 Player Max
- 5 Player Max
- 6 Player Max
- 7 Player Max
- 8 Player Max
- 9 Player Max
- 10 Player Max
- 11-16 Player Max
- 17-24 Player Max
- 25-64 Player Max
- 65-100 Player Max
- Massively Multiplayer

This would solve a lot of problems when looking for multiplayer games. It doesn’t solve all the problems, for example a game might have an 8 player brawl mode but only a 4 player co-op campaign mode. But I don’t see how that’s solvable without creating a huge number of tags for all scenarios, which would create all sorts of search issues again. But this would be a big improvement, and other than player count, the new tags could be automatically assigned from existing ones.