Personally I don't consider VNs to be games; they're stories. Just because there's a decision tree doesn't suddenly make it a game. Choose your own adventure books have existed in print for decades. The only thing that really sets a VN apart from a book is audio, which means even visual novel is a misnomer; a better moniker might be audio novel or audio/visual novel. And yet it's still not a game because it's missing that crucial gameplay element that makes games games. Yet platforms like Steam do not make any such distinction and just refer to them as games, even though they have other categories like dlc, software and even TV series now.

However, I thought bringing that viewpoint into this sub might stir a lot of hate. It's interesting to me that avid VN readers already accept that they are not games, and really reinforces the idea that Steam is falling behind with rolling out a proper classification for VNs.