In a surprise move, Valve has added a new official tag to its store, and its the ‘LGBTQ+’ tag, allowing developers and customers to sort out the games for faster discovery.

Kotaku reveals that the feature was in development for quite a while. The store’s tagging system was divided into an official and unofficial tag. The official tag helps the storefront recommend games to the players while the unofficial tag is just a system for users to sort out games without being visible to others.

The system was different back then. The LGBT tag had its own hub page, until last year when Valve began to distinguish between official tags and unofficial tags. Valve apparently removed hub page functionality from non-approved tags. This seems to be Valve’s effort to standardise the tags.

The recently added LGBTQ+ tag is now being populated with titles. Kotaku reveals that this occurred shortly after Nepenthe developer Yitz posted on the Steam developer forums about a tag that’s suitable for his upcoming game, To The Dark Tower.

But as we all know, the internet is full of trolls, therefore, developers, such as Yitz, are worried that the tag could be abused by trolls, either by users or developers applying it to games it did not apply to, or by people who portray a bad light towards the community.

Yitz said, “Tags like this are important because of what Steam tags are currently being used for classifying games by various factors that will impact the player’s experience, and recommending games with similar tags to players who seem to like a lot of the given tag.”

“As such, tags are sort of equivalent to visibility, in a way. If I enjoy a lot of games tagged ‘Psychological Horror,’ for example, Steam will show me more psychological horror games. If I want to play more games that challenge traditional gender roles, until today Steam had no way of knowing that.”

This is a good move by Steam to appeal to masses, but with Malaysia being a conservative state, as shown in the recent PUBG debacle, it might attract some flak.