If you’ve ever been onto the ‘Tags’ section in Steam, you know there’s a tag for everything. From ‘co-op’, to ‘visual novel’, to ‘adventure’ and ‘horror’, and much, much more. The tagging system also allows recommendations based on games in the Steam Library that have similar tags. So if you have a lot of games that have the ‘casual’ tag on it (like for Terrarria or City Skyline), then Steam will recommend more casual games to you (like House Flipper or Slime Rancher). The more tags you have, the more that Steam recommends. But as with everything, sometimes tags are harder to come by, or just don’t exist at all.

Since 2014, creators have been able to make their own custom tags, but due to the algorithm that Steam had, a lot of these tags were essentially useless as they weren’t official in Steam’s system. And this became an issue sometime last year when Steam had done a purge of a hub page of non-approved Steam tags. So any game that had ‘LGBTQ+’ as a tag, were left in the dust. So while some games had more prominent tags like ‘visual novel’ and ‘dating sim’ could be used in the algorithm, tags like ‘LGBTQ+’ were gone. And using that tag in particular, as a developer brought the issue into some light for Steam, and it has finally been resolved an entire year later.

This was brought up by a developer by the name of Yitz, who has been working on a project by the name of To The Dark Tower, and knew LGBTQ+ would be a perfect tag. So they brought it up on a developers forum, and Steam took notice of the issue. Yitz did go further into the issue of the lack of tags, as shown in an interview with Kotaku, and bringing up some further situations with trolls and misuse of the tag.

But despite the trepidations and concerns towards the tag being used negatively, the vote was that it would be seen more in a positive light (and during Pride Month, what better time than now to bring it to light), and the tag was officially added in. So now, games like Dream Daddy and Black Closet can finally have their LGBTQ+ tag and officially make their rounds through the algorithm as well. Currently there’s about 100+ games on this tag, and that number is bound to increase as more LGBTQ+ games begin to surface.