Shmups

(Invidious Link)

If you missed this whole thing (like I did) here's a summary:

Vampire Survivors-type games don't really have their own simple genre name or Steam tag, leading them to get lumped in with "Bullet Hell" shumps. So Awesome Games Studio (and 450 other studios) held a poll to determine what the gaming community thinks the tag should be.

Well, the results are in and "Bullet Heaven" won the poll. So now, Awesome Games Studio and their allies are asking Steam users to tag their favorite "survivors-likes" with "Bullet Heaven" as part of getting the tag officially recognized by Valve.

While I don't love the Bullet Heaven moniker, I am very much in favor of drawing a line between the danmaku shmup genre and the "rogue-like survival twin-stick" genre. Especially considering the influx of opportunistic, ignorant devs flooding into shmup discussion boards hunting for unpaid beta-testers, only because they looked at Steam's top-selling tags, found "bullet hell" "shoot em up" and "roguelike", and figured they could make some easy money crapping out yet another trend-chasing, low-effort, 2D pixel graphic slopfest -- not understanding that they're barking up the wrong tree because those Steam tags have become nearly meaningless.

But what do y'all think?