Steam
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| Developer(s) | Valve Corporation |
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| Initial release | September 12, 2003 |
| Platform | Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android |
| Website | https://store.steampowered.com |
Steam is one of the most popular video game distribution services created and owned by Valve Corporation. It offers features like digital rights management (DRM), social networking, measures against cheating, automatic updates of games, and more. As of 2025, the platform has over 130,000 games[1], including AAA and indie games, and has more than 132 million monthly active players[2].
Genres, Categories and Tags
Steam uses a combination of developer-assigned genres and community-driven tags to categorize games on the store page. Steam categories and tags help users discover, navigate, filter, and recommend the massive selection of games on the platform.
The Visual Novel category on the Steam Store is helpful for users to find games classified as Visual Novels on Steam. When viewing a specific Category page, in the filter menu on the left, you can find dropdowns for Top-Level Genres, Genres, Sub-Genres and other Attribute tags that help to narrow the search criteria for a novel of choice.
Steam Tags are a community-driven system where users can apply relevant and appropriate tags for a game to improve the Steam store's categorization of the game. Tags help users discover products through a new set of genres, themes, and attributes. These may range from gameplay mechanics ("Simulation," "Puzzle") to thematic elements ("Female Protagonist," "Dark Humor") and more. On a given game product's page, you will see the top user-submitted tags in the "Popular user-defined tags for this product:" section.
With genres, categories and tags, game developers and the community can improve game discoverability in the Steam store.
Developers and Publishers
Users may follow their favorite developers and publishers to be notified of their next releases. Game store pages will list the developers and publishers involved with a hyperlink to their respective homepage.
Developers and publishers can create a customized homepage page for their organization to display all the games made or published by that organization. There are a variety of ways to customize your homepage, and you'll be able to link all your individual games to your homepage. SteamWorks offers documentation on how to create and setup your Developer And Publisher Homepages.