The changes were targeted at developers seeking to artificially inflate their review scores through freely distributed keys. Should you prefer to filter out one type or the other, you can choose to see only reviews by Steam customers or those who used a key. Today, though, they announced that they’re walking it back a bit.
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In a blog post yesterday, the firm said one of the biggest piece of feedback received had to do with the inability to finding reviews “written by customers that obtained the game outside of Steam” in an easy manner.
One of the things I liked about Steam was how closed-garden ensured-quality it was, but three or so years ago, they chose to shift to being the “app store” of all PC games, pretty much, with the bar of quality much lower. Therefore. they are now working on resolving this by taking more factors into account when showing the more helpful user reviews.
Admitting the changes made it “more hard to find and read the helpful, articulate reviews written by customers that obtained the game outside of Steam”, Valve has given reviews from all purchase sources equal weighting in appearing on review pages. Many developers rely on positive reviews from its fan base to get a bump from Steam’s search algorithm, if your Kickstarters aren’t able to score a game and that’s your most ardent fan base, which may be a problem. “We want to make sure that helpful reviews can be surfaced regardless of purchase source, so we’re making a change to the defaults”. This was because they could be doled out wholesale by developers looking to game the system by posting positive reviews.
Do you think all Steam user reviews should be shown to the community or was Valve right to block outside reviews in the first place?
Valve will continue to work on perfecting the platform’s ratings.
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Valve is still working on the system, especially when it comes to helpful reviews which were giving “unpredictable” results. As for where the rest of this all goes, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, if only because I don’t imagine Valve will tell anyone until the next round of changes is live, and the cycle of “Wait, what the fuck” begins all over again.
