If you look at the traffic breakdown of any wildly successful indie game on Steam, you will notice a trend. The biggest source of organic, sustained store page traffic rarely comes from external social media or even the Discovery Queue.
It comes from the “More Like This” carousel.
Appearing at the bottom of a massive hit’s store page is the golden goose of Steam marketing. It essentially allows you to siphon high converting traffic from a competitor who has already spent the time and money building an audience. But how does Valve actually decide which games get placed in that coveted carousel? It isn’t random, and it isn’t based purely on review scores.
Here is how you can reverse engineer Steam’s tagging algorithm to force your game into the “More Like This” section of your biggest competitors.
1. The Tag Weighting Trap: Why ‘Action’ and ‘Indie’ Are Killing You
The biggest mistake developers make when setting up their Steam page is treating tags like SEO keywords on a blog, throwing every broad term they can think of onto the pile.
Steam’s recommendation algorithm relies heavily on tag overlap, but it weighs tags based on specificity. Broad tags like Indie, Action, or Adventure carry almost zero weight because they apply to millions of games.
The Strategy: You must aggressively rank your micro-genres. Imagine you are developing a 3D monochromatic horror game. If your top tags are Horror and Indie, Steam will try to compare you to Resident Evil or Phasmophobia. You will lose that algorithmic battle instantly.
However, if you push tags like Stylized, Atmospheric, Psychological Horror, and Lovecraftian to the very top of your list, Steam’s algorithm suddenly knows exactly what to do with you. You stop competing against the entire horror genre and start specifically targeting the “More Like This” sections of games that share that exact, highly specific visual and thematic identity.
2. The ‘Co-Play’ Metric (The Secret Sauce)
Tags get you into the same neighborhood, but “Co-Play” gets you into the house.
Steam doesn’t just look at what a game is; it looks at who plays it. If a significant percentage of players who own Game A also own Game B, Steam heavily links them in the recommendation engine.
While you can’t force players to buy both games, you can manipulate this metric during your pre-launch phase:
- Demo Overlap: If you are participating in Steam Next Fest, actively encourage your community to play the demos of your direct competitors.
- Bundle Agreements: Reaching out to developers in your specific sub-genre to do cross-promotions or “Complete the Set” bundles post-launch is the fastest way to cement your game in their “More Like This” section permanently.
3. The Bounce Rate Penalty
Even if your tags match perfectly, Valve will not recommend your game if your store page bleeds traffic.
When Steam tests putting your game in a competitor’s carousel, they monitor how users behave when they click through. If a user clicks your capsule, watches 3 seconds of a poorly paced, cinematic logo intro in your trailer, and immediately clicks the back button, Steam flags your page as low converting.
Your store page must be ruthlessly optimized for immediate retention. Cut the logos, start the trailer with immediate gameplay, and ensure your capsule art directly communicates the gameplay loop. A high retention rate tells the algorithm, “Yes, people who like that other game also like this one.”
4. How to Measure Your Success
Tag optimization is not a “set it and forget it” task. You have to monitor the data to see if your adjustments are actually successfully siphoning traffic.
If you adjust your tags to perfectly mirror a specific competitor, you should expect to see your daily baseline follower growth begin to correlate with theirs.
This is exactly why we built WishlistEngine.
You cannot optimize what you do not track. WishlistEngine allows you to track the daily follower velocity of your top Steam competitors in real-time. If you change your tags, update your trailer, or launch a cross-promotion, you can instantly see if your daily follower acquisition rate is closing the gap between you and the games you are trying to siphon from.
Stop guessing what the algorithm wants. Monitor your baseline, track your competitors, and optimize your page with real data.
Stop guessing. Start tracking.
Don’t market your game in a vacuum. Track your competitors’ daily growth, discover niche micro-streamers, and hit your target wishlist velocity.
Set Up Your Free Dashboard →FAQ
You should always apply the maximum allowed limit of 20 tags to your Steam store page. However, the algorithm weighs tags based on their order. Your top 5 tags dictate the core identity of your game. Instead of filling the top slots with broad terms, use hyper-specific micro-genres. For example, pushing tags like “3D” and “Monochromatic” above generic terms like “Horror” helps the algorithm place you next to highly relevant competitors instead of burying you under massive AAA titles.
Assuming your tags overlap correctly, the most common culprit is a high bounce rate. The Steam algorithm constantly tests your game in competitor carousels. If users click your capsule but immediately hit the back button, Steam assumes the recommendation was poor and removes you. This is usually caused by trailers that waste the first 5 to 10 seconds on cinematic logo intros. To lower your bounce rate and stay in the carousel, ensure your trailer cuts to actual gameplay immediately.
You can include broad tags toward the bottom of your 20-tag list, but they should never be in your top 5. Because millions of games share the “Indie” tag, it carries almost no weight in the recommendation engine. Placing broad tags too high dilutes your game’s specific identity and makes it much harder for Steam to calculate which niche audience actually wants to play it.
While the backend tag updates process within 24 to 48 hours, the algorithmic shift takes time because Steam needs to measure the new traffic. You cannot rely on total wishlists to judge this, as the numbers are too broad. The most accurate way to measure tag success is to track your daily follower velocity. If you optimize your tags to match a successful competitor, you should see your daily baseline of new followers begin to rise within a week.