The debate is over. Valve has added 17 new tags to the Steam store, and the very first one settles what the gaming community has been arguing about for years: the genre spawned by Vampire Survivors is officially called bullet heaven.
Valve's own description on the new tag page reads: "The opposite of Bullet Hell; Focus on upgrades while automatically attacking hordes of enemies." Clean, accurate, and now permanently baked into Steam's store infrastructure. Games like Megabonk, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, and Soulstone Survivors are already sitting under the tag in the top charts.
How bullet heaven beat out the competition
The push for an official name has been building for a while. Steam hosted multiple Bullet Heaven Festivals, with the most recent one in December 2025 including a public poll directly asking Valve to formally recognize the term. That community pressure appears to have worked.
The key here is that bullet heaven was never the only contender. "Survivor" and "Survivors" became so embedded in the genre that developers were literally dropping the word into their game titles as shorthand for the whole concept, especially throughout 2023 and 2024. That wave has cooled off somewhat, and with Valve now planting a flag, the naming conversation has a definitive answer.
PC Gamer's Robin Valentine argued against bullet heaven as recently as last year, giving it a 1 out of 5 and preferring "survivor" instead. His reasoning was that bullet heaven implies a mechanical connection to bullet hell games that doesn't really exist. Logically, not a bad point. But bullet heaven is simply more fun to say, and apparently Valve agreed.
The bullet heaven tag page on Steam already shows well-known entries in the genre, making it a useful discovery tool for players looking for more games in the Vampire Survivors mold.
The other 16 tags Valve dropped at the same time
Bullet heaven grabbed the headlines, but Valve added 16 more tags covering a wide range of genres and themes. Here's the full list:
Wuxia getting its own tag is long overdue given how many games in that space have landed on Steam. The cozy game pipeline also gets a formal nod with organizing, cleaning, and decorating all now properly categorized.
What Valve removed from the store
Alongside the new additions, Valve cut a significant number of tags it deemed no longer useful. Gone are "Masterpiece," "Well-Written," and "Cult Classic" for being too subjective. "America" and "Foreign" were removed, as was "Illuminati." The tag "Clicker" has been renamed to "Incremental" to better capture the broader category of games where numbers go up. "Pool" became "Billiards," and "Roguevania" was quietly retired.
Some fan-favorite tags like "Dungeons & Dragons," "Warhammer 40K," and "LEGO" are also gone, likely due to trademark concerns or overlap with other existing tags.
For players who want to explore everything the bullet heaven genre has to offer, the Vampire Survivors guides collection is a solid starting point for getting the most out of the game that started it all. And if you want to branch out across other genres now that Steam's tagging system is getting a proper cleanup, the gaming guides hub has you covered across the board.
