The first five tags are the shelf.
A store page asks for up to twenty tags and shows the first five beside the game: on the page, on the search result, on the “more like this” row. Those five are the shelf you are put on, and the order you type them in is the order the store weights them. Most pages we read were tagged in the order the developer thought of them. Here is how the sample’s list was ordered, and the rule behind it.
The first five are the shelf
A buyer who has never heard of the game reads the five tags and places it: a puzzle game, hand-drawn, about exploring, underwater, with a story. That sentence is the shelf. If the five are Indie, Singleplayer, 2D, Atmospheric, Casual, the sentence is “an indie game”, which is every game. The five that matter are the ones that would be false for most other games on the store.
How to order them
- What you do. The genre tag a buyer would search: Exploration, Puzzle, Deckbuilder, City Builder. If there are two, both go first, the one a buyer is likelier to browse ahead.
- How it looks or feels, in the store’s own word: Hand-drawn, Pixel Graphics, Atmospheric, Cozy. One is enough.
- The setting or the subject, if the store has a tag for it: Underwater, Space, Medieval, Farming.
- The thing that makes it worth the money: Story Rich, Roguelike, Physics, Procedural Generation.
- Then the shape words: 2D, Singleplayer, Relaxing, Mystery, Indie, Controller. They are true and they help the store’s filters, but they place nothing, so they go after the five.
The worked example
The invented Hollowmere list from the sample page. The first five say: an exploration puzzle game, hand-drawn, atmospheric, underwater. A buyer browsing the Underwater tag or the Hand-drawn tag finds it; a buyer browsing Puzzle finds it among thousands, which is why Puzzle is second and not first. Story Rich is sixth because the notes say sixty kept things tell the story with no dialogue, which is a story, but the buyer who wants a puzzle game first is the one who buys.
Only the store’s own words
Every tag comes from the store’s public tag list and nothing else. A word that is not on the list is not a tag; typing “Bell-diving” does not make a shelf, it makes a tag nobody can browse to. The list is public and searchable on the store itself; the sample used twelve from it and invented none.
Three tags to leave off
- A tag the game cannot keep. “Metroidvania” on the sample would have been false: the notes describe no ability gating. The buyers who browse that tag know what it means, and the first review will say so.
- A tag for the game you wish you had made. “Open World” on a five-district puzzle game. The store’s “more like this” row will then show it beside games it is not like, to buyers who want those.
- “Indie” in the first five. It is true of most of the store. It goes on the list, near the end, where it costs nothing.
How many
All twenty if you can fill them honestly; twelve if you cannot. Each true tag after the fifth is another filter you appear in. A false one anywhere is a refund.
Three questions.
Do the tags change what the store recommends?
The store says tags feed its recommendations and its “more like this” rows, and weights the earlier ones more. We can see the effect in which games appear beside a page, not in a number. The five you choose first are the games you will be shown next to.
Should the short description and the tags use the same words?
Where they are true, yes: “hand-drawn exploration puzzle game” in the description and Hand-drawn, Exploration, Puzzle in the tags. A buyer who reads one and then the other should find the same game. It is not a trick; it is the page agreeing with itself.
Can players change my tags?
On some stores players can apply tags of their own, and the store counts them. A page tagged honestly tends to collect the same tags back; a page tagged for a shelf it does not belong on collects the correction in public.
Get the sample copy first
The invented Hollowmere page as a PDF, and our one-page list of the eight things a store page needs before you press publish and the four that get pages sent back.
The short description, the About section, five feature bullets and an ordered tag list from your own notes, within two days, $49 / £39 / A$75 / C$65. Tags come from the store’s public list only; nothing invented.