A good game discovery system gives someone looking for games a wide range of methods to slice up games to find something interesting. In the past itch.io only let you browse games by platform, genre and price. itch.io always let developers assign tags but never gave the game players an easy way to find them.

You can now browse tags from the new Top tags page, ~170 selected tags:

http://itch.io/tags

You also might notice new related tags sections on a few other parts of the site to help you find interesting tags.

I decided to spend some time looking through what tags developers were giving their games and noticed they were way too disjoint! There were a lot of instances where people would use variations of the same tag, like zombie and zombies. I decided to curate a master list of tags while still keeping the free-form input for the things I couldn’t think of. I also merged tag synonyms wherever appropriate.

The new tag pages contain a formatted title, sometimes a description, and the games. Additionally I’ve made it easy to move to adjacent tags with a related tags list. (Try out games tagged Atmospheric)

Because I want to be the tag pages to be nice pages to find out more a group of games, I’ve made it so regular users can suggest updates to the description of the tag pages.

For developers the new tag picker has an autocompleter to suggest some of the predefined tags to make sure your game gets the right visibility in the right tags.

If you’ve got any ideas for more featured tags I’d love to hear them.

Enjoy!