Update 2: After a campaign to get Valve’s attention and give bullet heaven games a proper tag, a new and official event for survivors-likes called Steam Bullet Fest 2026 has just been confirmed.
I’m pretty sure this will not settle the debate around nomenclature, and Valve uses the term “Survivor-likes” instead of Bullet Heaven, so who knows what tags we’re going to get. Honestly, I don’t mind either way, but I know that precise terminology is important to many.
The event itself will feature both traditional bullet hells and more contemporary survivors-likes, or bullet heavens, or auto-shooters, or reverse bullet hells, or upside-down-inverted-return-fire-bullet-shooters, as I like to call them.
Here’s the official copy from Steam, which is calling developers to apply for inclusion in the June-based event.
Projectiles! Everywhere! Either coming for you or coming from you – this Fest is for all types of Bullet games, from the classic Bullet Hells to modern day Survivor-likes.
This event runs 8 June @ 10:00am PST to 15 June @ 10:00am PST and will include eligible titles with sections for discounted titles, unreleased titles in Coming Soon mode, and games with demos.
Regardless of the tags we get between now and then, I’m sure there’ll be some deals to be had when the best bullet heavens, auto-shooters, reverse bullet hells, and games like Vampire Survivors get their own big sales event on Steam this Summer.
Update 1: The voting is over, and with 8000 people lending their thoughts, the proposed genre tag for games like Vampire Survivors is: bullet heaven.
Next, the event organisers are asking that we all go into our Steam accounts and start tagging our favourite auto-shooters, survivors-likes, and reverse bullet hells with the now agreed bullet heaven tag. That should make Valve sit up and take notice!
Original: Can you believe that in the year 2025, there are still no proper Steam tags for auto-shooters, bullet heavens, and survivors-likes?
I know this all too well; as someone who spends way too much time looking through store listings in search of roguish treasure, discoverability is a real problem for games operating in this niche.
The bullet heaven genre is a big deal now, and it features some brilliant games. In fact, this whole party was kicked off by the success of Vampire Survivors – a favourite of mine and one of the games that inspired Rogueliker.
Since the launch of Vampire Survivors, we’ve seen countless attempts to replicate and capture that same spirit, and some of them are very close and even just as good as the source material, in my humble opinion.
Many of these games feature prominently in Bullet Heaven Fest 3.0, which just launched on Steam. It’s a massive sale starring hundreds of auto-shooters, and it demonstrates the true depth of this burgeoning genre and highlights why it’s so important that these games have better tags.
Luckily, there is something we can do about it. You see, there’s a cheeky little poll doing the rounds, where people can vote on the tags that they would like to see included on Steam in the future. It’s a Google Form, and you’ll find it via this overlong hyperlink.
I’ve been chatting with some of the developers behind this event and the accompanying push for better tags. That includes my buds over at Awesome Games Studio, and they’ve been keeping me posted on how things are going.
At the time of writing, there have already been more than 5,500 votes on the matter, and with more than 450 game developers joining in on promoting the vote as part of Bullet Heaven Fest 3.0, we’re hoping that a lot more people will lend their support.
As part of my prep for this feature, I asked Diana Biszczanik, the head of marketing at Awesome Games Studio, why it was so important from their perspective.
“Steam optimization,” she started. “When you launch a Steam store page, not the full release yet, one of the biggest things that decides your visibility is tags. Even their order matters.
“One bad tag choice and your page will be shown in the ‘more like this’ section of completely different titles, so you won’t reach your target audience. Experienced devs learn to game this, but a new creator with a cool title can easily get lost and never find the players who’d actually love it.
It goes beyond discovery, however. Incorrectly tagging games, which is what is currently happening to auto shooters and bullet heavens, can lead to damaging reviews from players who buy the game with a false impression of what it’s like.
“Yet Another Zombie Survivors is a top-down 3D game, and without a clear genre tag, players sometimes assumed it was a traditional top-down shooter, and this led to negative reviews. A proper tag would help set expectations correctly,” Diana explained.
AGS’s marketing chief also shared the same sentiments as I have as a player: better tagging makes for a better user experience and better game discovery.
Awesome Games Studio has partnered with a number of other indie publishers for this, including Sidekick Publishing, Erabit, and Human Qube Games. On top of that, with hundreds more devs participating in Bullet Heaven Fest 3.0 this week, there has never been a better time to find a new auto shooter.
