Steam killed its ‘RPGMaker’ user tag yesterday, and impacted devs are unexpectedly happy about it

Valve stuck its oar in the tides of history yesterday, performing a spring clean of Steam’s user-tagging system that added 17 new tags and removed 28 old ones. Most importantly, of course, it finally settled the debate as to what the hell we all call the “Vampire Survivors-like” genre, but it also notably excised the “RPGMaker” tag, which players have long stuck on games made using RPG Maker dev tools or that look like they were made using those tools.

And, strangely enough, RPG Maker devs seem pretty happy about it.

Not everyone is psyched, of course—”why would you remove rpgmaker are you fucking insane” lamented one dev on Bluesky in the wake of Steam’s update—but visit hubs of RPG Maker development and you’ll mostly find devs feeling very sanguine about the whole thing.

“To be honest I think [the RPGMaker tag] was probably doing more harm than good,” wrote one RPG Maker MZ dev on Reddit. “Those who avoid RPG Maker games due to some preconception, possibly based on shovelware or RPG Maker ‘slop’, may then find one that they indeed like if they can’t exclude it from tags.”

Exclusion is the other side of the coin with Steam’s tag system. While you can use tags to narrow games down—to hunt for certain kinds of games that fill whatever niche a particular tag denotes—you can also use them to mark exclusions. Never want to see a sports game? Just nix the tag. Tired of seeing exotic fetish content in Steam’s most popular upcoming list? Blacklist the “Sexual content” tag. Though joke’s on you in that instance: everything is someone’s exotic fetish.

Plenty of players across the years have applied just this kind of exclusion to the RPGMaker tag. It’s not unreasonable: a lot of dreadful shovelware gets produced and sold using those tools. But the drawback is that all the genuinely cool and exciting work gets hidden from users too, including a lot of stuff that isn’t even made with RPG Maker—these tags are applied based on vibes, not on concrete analysis.

So although users who genuinely used the RPGMaker tag to find cool games made using those tools are rather upset, I get the impression devs making these games consider it a worthwhile tradeoff to resurface the stuff they make. “Happy to see the tag removed,” writes another Reddit user, “as I’m sure due to the high amount of low effort crap, it did the good games more harm than good.”

Even the official RPG Maker forums seem to lean positive: “I think it’s good,” writes one user. “I honestly felt that tag helped, at least in some small part, creating the negative perception around RPG Maker during its heyday around the Steam Greenlight era.”

But do pour one out for those players who can no longer easily find new RPG Maker games on Steam itself. “Steam really removed the rpgmaker tag because it was ‘too broad’ and then they add a fucking tag for capybaras,” says one. “Fuck you steam.”

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