If you’ve been swept up in the bullet heaven craze over the past couple of years, Steam has officially caught up. Valve has rolled out a major overhaul to its store tag system, adding 17 new tags, removing 28, and renaming or merging a handful more. The standout addition is Bullet Heaven, which is basically a more neutral way of saying survivors-like. It finally puts a name on the genre that’s eaten hundreds of hours of our time through games like Megabonk, (arguably) Ball x Pit, and Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road.
The rest of the new additions cover a mix of genres, mechanics, and themes. Wuxia and Xianxia are now tags for fans of Chinese historical fantasy and cultivation-driven adventure. There’s a cluster of cozy-adjacent additions with Cleaning, Organizing, and Decorating, all hitting a similar dopamine pocket. Espionage, Samurai, Cult, Poker, and Language Learning round out the gameplay-and-theme side. On the animal front, Steam added Animals, Wolves, and Capybaras as standalone tags. Capybaras getting its own tag is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from Steam in 2026.
On the removal side, Valve dropped 28 tags it considers too subjective, too overlapping with more descriptive options, or too tied to specific intellectual property. Mature and NSFW are gone since they overlap with tags like Gore, Violent, and Sexual Content. Well-Written and Masterpiece are out for being too subjective, which is fair given how often those tags became flashpoints. IP-based tags including Warhammer 40K, Games Workshop, Dungeons & Dragons, LEGO, and Illuminati are being retired in favor of developer-set franchise pages. RPGMaker is also being removed, which is a curious one. As someone who built a game in RPG Maker MZ, it kind of sucks to lose that as a discovery hook, especially since the engine has its own dedicated fanbase that actively searches for games made with it. Or maybe there isn’t, which is probably why the tag is being removed.
A few cleanup moves are also worth noting. Clicker has been renamed to Incremental to better capture games focused on numbers going up. Pool is becoming Billiards since the tag was getting humorously applied to games that just had a swimming pool. Unforgiving is being merged into Difficult, and Jet is being merged into Flight. The full list is up on Steam’s announcement post, and Valve says it’s open to community suggestions in the comments for what to add next.
