Some other links for topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/7bl2dp/could_we_talk_about_how_useless_steam_tags_are/
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/discussions/forum/0/5077247524969269695/
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jtW7zpQQrYo

Would be nice, but Steam decided let users vote on the tags for the games. Only way to solve it is take that right away from users, and let devs decide what they want.

Originally posted by Dr.Shadowds 🐉:

Would be nice, but Steam decided let users vote on the tags for the games. Only way to solve it is take that right away from users, and let devs decide what they want.

It's fine being able to give tags to games, but then there also needs to be a way to remove them. Otherwise we could add all tags in existence to every game by "voting them up". Have group of 10 friends or whatever online group.

"Vote down" does not even exist.

Edit: Correction, there is actually a flag "report" in the adding tag page at least. I wonder how responsive that is though.
It says they need to "reach certain threshold of reports in order to be taken action in"...
/facepalm

But here's my today's catches just for NGU Idle: https://imgur.com/a/woSsrr5

Originally posted by Zaflis:

Originally posted by Dr.Shadowds 🐉:

Would be nice, but Steam decided let users vote on the tags for the games. Only way to solve it is take that right away from users, and let devs decide what they want.

It's fine being able to give tags to games, but then there also needs to be a way to remove them. Otherwise we could add all tags in existence to every game by "voting them up". Have group of 10 friends or whatever online group.

"Vote down" does not even exist.

Edit: Correction, there is actually a flag "report" in the adding tag page at least. I wonder how responsive that is though.
It says they need to "reach certain threshold of reports in order to be taken action in"...
/facepalm

But here's my today's catches just for NGU Idle: https://imgur.com/a/woSsrr5

Yes can report tags on games, game devs can request tags to be remove as well.

> Be Steam
> Hire furries
> Allow the store to be flooded with zoophilic content
> Ban the "Furry" tag so that users have no choice but remove all other adult content in order to get rid of it.

Originally posted by Zaflis:

Give real warnings to developers for maintaining such tags if this is how system works here...

The issue is tags are not defined by developers, they are set by users and there is no logical way for steam to track 130,000+ games to ensure tag accuracy. I mean assume it only took them 2 minutes per game to check for accuracy.

That is 260,000+ minutes or 4,333 hours. So that would take 1 person 541 days to check. Then as soon as they've checked a game once it can have the bad tags be re-added again right afterwards.

In reality it would take longer to check as the numbers i used are very conservative. The best thing to do as mentioned is report bad tags.

It doesn't take 2 minutes to check a single game, i was proposing using the most common tags like that "psychological horror" and then purge titles of it that doesn't belong there. You can generally see in 3 seconds if it doesn't. Maybe few more seconds if you have to actually click open the game when it's new to you. I mean an actual tag review interface that we don't have access to, similar to how databases are managed. I don't know what you know about SQL queries... and maybe even views made.

In any case it's something any one of us can do with the Steam store page provided, just do a search and do a quick glance, that's all really. Seeing and reporting a game takes more clicks than it would do with a proper fast reviewing tool but that's what we have for now...

Originally posted by Zaflis:

It doesn't take 2 minutes to check a single game,

It probably takes far longer. You have to go to the game, you have to see what the game is, then you have to read the list of all the tags. No one at steam is going to know every game on the platform and know from memory if a tag is appropriate so it will probably take research to understand if its appropriate or not.

Originally posted by Zaflis:

i was proposing using the most common tags like that "psychological horror" and then purge titles of it that doesn't belong there.

Ok so it takes 20-30 seconds to check that tag. Now multiply that by the dozens of tags games have.

For instance https://store.steampowered.com/app/893180/Catherine_Classic/

That has 20 tags to check. Someone not familiar with the game would have to research it to see if the puzzle tag is correct, i am familiar with the game and don't even know if it has local multiplayer which is one of the tags, etc.

And again, once you've done a check once it can wrong again 5 seconds later. I've designed and managed SQL databases, queries don't do jack when tags are subjective and you have 130k games that people aren't familiar with.

The issue is that you either have strict tags and limit it to the developer when most won't properly tag it, or you have looser tags and let users define it and you have to deal with a few cases of outliers. Hence why there is a report system to clean up bad ones you find. if Steam starts messing with tags and removing them its going to cause all sorts of drama such as the people who argue what an RPG actually is and claim games like Zelda aren't RPG's - https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/03/talking_point_is_zelda_an_rpg_or_not

Yes its a thing and people are ridiculuous but it would likely cause more issues then it would fix.

One thing to keep in mind is that the tags don't define the games genre but highlight aspects of the game. Unfortunately, they are often mixed together.

For instance, I've lost count of how many 1st or 3rd person shooters are tagged with Racing. They're definitely not racing games, but they may have a playable event within the game that constitutes as a race. Mad Max and Rage 2 come to mind. Both have Racing tags but they are far from Racing games. They have racing in them, though, so they are tagged as such.