(Updated and republished November 2, 2026)
As games grow more complex and catalogs grow larger, the need for a modern game taxonomy has become impossible to ignore. A video game taxonomy is a systematic classification of games based on shared characteristics: gameplay mechanics, themes, art styles, technical requirements, and more. Its job in a catalog is practical. It decides which games a search returns, which ones share a browse row, and which one a player is shown next.
With the massive expansion of the video game market, platforms, retailers and aggregators now carry tens of thousands of titles from many providers. The catalog teams behind them, from metadata and search to browse and recommendations, are asked to do something hard: show each player the games they're actually likely to buy. Provider genres and store tags get a catalog started, but they record what a game contains and stop there. This is where a comprehensive, flexible and actionable taxonomy comes in.
This piece is written for those teams. It follows two games, Forza Horizon 5 and The Last of Us Part II, through each part of a taxonomy and then into search and browse, where the difference shows up in results.
(If you're rethinking how your catalog is classified, our Custom Taxonomy Implementation Guide walks through what a gaming-native structure looks like in practice.)
What is a game taxonomy?
A valuable game taxonomy goes far beyond simple genre labels. It breaks games down into hundreds of specific tags across categories like art style, theme, mechanics and game modes, and those tags are what turn a list of titles into structured video game metadata: the information about each game that search, filters, recommendations and analytics actually read.
Put our two games through a genre-only system and you get two words: racing, and action-adventure. Put them through a taxonomy and you get hundreds of data points each, from setting and mood to modes, progression and rating.
The complexity of modern games
Today's games are complex works designed to hold players for a long time, and assuming a single aspect makes a game special is a mistake. The Last of Us Part II is usually filed as action-adventure. In our record, adventure is its defining genre, while action, shooting, stealth, survival and survival horror are all key to how it plays, and puzzles, driving and role-playing each have a notable place. A catalog that stores one label has thrown most of that away.
Genres are often defined by the primary actions players take: shooting in a shooter, solving puzzles in a puzzle game, driving in a racing game, building a character in an RPG. Forza Horizon 5 is defined by racing, and just as much by its open world. These primary actions, combined with theme and narrative, describe what a game actually is. But a single genre label can never capture the full picture.
Hierarchical structures and tags
Modern taxonomies use a nested structure (category, genre, subgenre) to pinpoint specific niches. Forza Horizon 5 sits under racing, and further down among open-world racers with realistic driving. The Last of Us Part II sits under action-adventure, close to survival horror. The hierarchy keeps each game near its real neighbors and shows how closely related subgenres connect.
Beneath that hierarchy sit hundreds of tags across art style, theme, mechanics and modes, and those tags are the backbone of the structured metadata that powers search, discovery and analysis across the industry. Tags alone still leave one question open: how much does each one matter?
The values system: going beyond flat genre labels
Gameopedia has been delivering game data to some of the world's biggest companies for 20 years, and our catalog now covers 285,000+ game titles, editions and DLCs. Genre, feature set, mechanics and art style give each one a high-level description, but they don't fully capture what a game offers.
To close that gap, we assign a value to each feature and mechanic, reflecting how significant, prevalent and frequent it is, and how much it contributes to player skill and enjoyment. There are four. A defining feature is essential to the game's identity. A key feature significantly influences how it plays. A notable feature is present and noticeable but not central. An elemental feature adds flavor or variety.
In plain terms, the value tells you whether a feature is a defining pillar of the game or a side dish. Every feature raises two questions for a catalog: whether a feature exists and how central it is. A presence-only tag answers the first. The value answers the second.
Application example: one tag, two weights
Take the open world. Both games have one, and a presence-only tag stops there.
In Forza Horizon 5, the open world is a defining feature, alongside racing, driving and collecting cars. Playground Games built its Mexico for driving, with roads, off-road routes and events spread across the map, and changing weather and seasons that are key to how it plays. Story is only an element.
In The Last of Us Part II, the open world is notable. Naughty Dog built its open areas as stretches between linear story sequences, and the game's pillars are the ones listed above.
Same feature, two weights: a pillar in one game and a side dish in the other. That extra layer is what lets a catalog see what makes each game work, and which players each one is for.
Why detail matters in video game classification
Video games have evolved into some of the most complex entertainment products ever made, and modern games blend genres so freely that single-label classification can't keep up. Weighted mechanics are only part of the record a catalog needs. Two other dimensions decide just as much.
The first is theme and tone. Both games are set in places you'd recognize, yet Forza Horizon 5 is light-hearted and cheerful throughout, while The Last of Us Part II is serious, dark and tragic. Some taxonomies also classify games by the kind of fun they deliver (challenge, discovery, narrative, fellowship), and on that axis one offers freedom and the other a story that stays with you.
The second is age and content ratings, which vary by region: Europe uses PEGI, North America uses the ESRB, Japan uses CERO, and many other markets run their own systems. Forza Horizon 5 is rated PEGI 3 and E for Everyone. The Last of Us Part II is rated PEGI 18 and Mature 17+.
Player-centric classification
Not all classification is about the game itself. Some of the most useful frameworks describe the player. In his 1996 paper Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs, Richard Bartle described four player types: achievers, who set themselves goals inside the game; explorers, who want to find out how the world works; socializers, who play for the other players; and killers, who play to act on other players.
Run our two games through that lens and they split again. Both reward explorers. Forza Horizon 5 also serves achievers, with leaderboards and a car collection to complete, and socializers, with car clubs, co-op and an auction house. The Last of Us Part II is a single-player game, so a socializer looking for company won't find it there. Combined with a feature-level taxonomy of the games themselves, player-centric models give a fuller picture of why certain experiences resonate with certain audiences.
Classification frameworks worth knowing
Games can be grouped in several other complementary ways. By type: simulations, abstract games, sports, and so on. By the realism of a single standout system: Forza Horizon 5's driving is realistic enough to be a key feature, but in our record it isn't a racing simulator. Forza Motorsport, from the same franchise, is: simulation and motorsport define it, on licensed circuits rather than an open map.
No single framework is complete on its own. The value of a comprehensive taxonomy is that it holds several of these views at once, describing the same game by its mechanics, its tone, its rating and its intended audience. That combination is what a catalog finally puts to work.
A breakdown in practice: two open-world games in search and browse
Everything above ends up in at least four places a platform catalog team runs. Take the same pair of records through each, first with presence-only tags and then with weights.
Search
A player types "open world". With presence-only tags, both games match equally and the order falls to popularity or text match. With weights, ranking can favor games whose open world is defining, so Forza Horizon 5 rises and The Last of Us Part II still appears, lower down. Nothing is hidden. The order starts to reflect what the player asked for.
Filters
An "open world" facet built on presence returns both games every time. Built on weights, it can default to games built around an open world, with an option to include games that simply have one. Combined with ratings, the same facet stops putting a PEGI 18 survival story in front of a family profile looking for a racing game.
Browse rows
A row called "open worlds to get lost in" can be generated from defining open worlds, so Forza Horizon 5 qualifies and The Last of Us Part II doesn't. A row for serious, story-led adventures picks up The Last of Us Part II from its defining genre and its tone. Neither row has to be curated by hand.
"More like this"
The player who finished The Last of Us Part II should be offered games that share its pillars: adventure, stealth, survival, a serious and dark tone. With presence-only tags, the shared open world is enough to put Forza Horizon 5 on that list. With weights, a side dish stops counting as a reason.
The same applies in reverse. A Forza Horizon 5 fan shouldn't be handed Forza Motorsport just because the franchise and the genre match. One is an open-world racer built around freedom, the other a circuit simulator built around challenge. With weights, the franchise stops deciding the answer.
Same two records, four surfaces, and the weight changes the answer on each.
Industry use cases for game taxonomy
The teams who feel this most are the catalog teams at game platforms, storefronts, subscription and cloud services, retailers and aggregators. They share one need, a trusted description of every game, and each role meets it differently.
Catalog and metadata leads ingest records from many providers, each with its own genres. They need one set of definitions and weights, so the same game means the same thing whichever provider sent it, and a new release arrives with a complete record from day one.
Search leads need relevance that reflects what a game is built on, so the order of results matches what a player typed.
Browse and merchandising teams need rows they can build from rules, because hand-picking collections doesn't scale across tens of thousands of titles.
Recommendation teams need similarity that rests on shared pillars, so two games that only share a minor feature stop being recommended after one another.
For many of these teams, the answer becomes a taxonomy built around their own catalog. Building the taxonomy is half the job; applying it consistently, title after title and update after update, is the other half. As Timothy Lu, Senior Staff Data Scientist at Discord, put it: "Gameopedia has this taxonomy, which is fantastic, but the value add has really been the service provided on top of that."
The bottom line
The industry has outgrown the simple genre labels it inherited from physical retail. Games are now multi-dimensional experiences, and the systems that classify them have to be just as multi-dimensional.
Most catalogs already have tags, and a model can suggest more. Neither gives you a weight that means the same thing across tens of thousands of titles. That takes shared definitions, trained specialists and quality checks, which is how Gameopedia decides what defines a game.
If your search and browse keep pairing games that share a tag and little else, we can walk your team through how weighting would change the results on your own catalog.
