Valve has announced that it’s updating Steam Reviews with a new helpfulness system. It’s finally solving a problem that’s been plaguing its platform for years.
Why does the user review system need to be updated? I’ll highlight the issues to provide some context.
Steam reviews are often useless
When players want to buy a game or DLC, they can see reviews by outlets, gameplay videos on YouTube. But some people prefer to see reviews on the item’s Steam page, because unlike other options, reviews on the store are relatively up-to-date. Personally, I find reviews helpful in knowing about the status of the game, i.e. whether it has bugs, or it is still being updated, or the game has been abandoned by the developer, how long the game is, etc. These comments can help you in your purchasing decisions.
But sometimes reviews can be not helpful at all. If you go to a game’s page and scroll down to the review section, there’s a high chance you’ll come across some memes, bad jokes, fake stories, ASCII art, or even just inappropriate and embarrassing things. I like jokes, but not in the Steam review section. This isn’t a social network where you can post nonsense for internet points.
Imagine you are an indie developer, and people start writing reviews that are just jokes and memes, etc. The actual reviews of the game might get buried in a pile of spam, and this might ultimately affect the sales of your game.
Another problem with Steam reviews is review bombing. This has been a big problem for many years, but Valve handles the issue quite well, marking them as off-topic. While it can be used in a malicious way such as political bias, review bombing reviews can be justified in some cases, for example, users can get the attention of developers to force them to fix their games, or express their displeasure about games having overpriced items, in-app purchases, and of course, bugs upon release.
There are over 140 million user reviews on Steam, unfortunately a significant number of which are spammy.
Valve’s new support system for Steam reviews is awesome
The new Steam review system will filter out reviews containing one word, ASCII art, memes, jokes, etc. as low priority. It will instead highlight useful reviews, helping users understand why the reviewer liked a game. This does not affect a game’s overall rating. The new system is enabled by default for all users on both the web and the Steam app.
Steam uses a combination of user reports, its own moderation teams, to determine whether reviews are helpful or not. The thumbs up and thumbs down buttons are not a factor in deciding whether a review is informative or not, but it does take into account when users mark a review as helpful. Valve says it also uses some machine algorithms designed “to help scale human judgment calls”, to filter reviews based on their content.
Announcement Says it may take some time to evaluate existing and newly posted reviews, but it seems the system has already taken effect, and it’s fantastic. Take a look at the screenshot, it’s for the same game (Stray) shown in the first screenshot, the second one is much better.
Valve admits that it cannot remove user reviews, even if they are reported as unhelpful, because it wants players to express their opinions, even if users don’t explain why they don’t like the game. This means that while the new helpfulness system doesn’t completely remove low-effort reviews, you can enable an option to see them while browsing. Users who want to use the old review system can scroll down to the Reviews section, and uncheck the “Use new helpfulness system” option.
Thanks for reading..
