With how the system originally worked, newer reviews were not always as visible as older reviews that were deemed ‘most helpful.’ Now recent reviews will be featured more prominently, to give customers a more up-to-date view of the game. With the introduction of a review system for titles on the Steam storefront a few years ago, it became possible for viewers to ascertain the quality of a game at a glance, or seek out more detailed criticism as necessary.
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Unlike on Metacritic and many other sites, where anyone can vote and leave a comment, reviews are only open to Steam users who purchased the game on the gaming portal. This should also be good news for Steam users, as it could encourage developers to actually fix their games in the hopes of getting more sales down the road.
Now, however, the company will be adding a rolling “recent review score” based on the percentage of positive reviews submitted during the past 30 days. The second column makes the Summary filter the most efficient method of gauging the current status of user reviews. Valve states that games which have been published on Steam for more than 45 days and with enough reviews posted in the past 30 days will be able to take advantage of the feature.
“For [the user] review score, we’d previously only been compiling an overall score using a simple calculation of the percentage of all reviews that were positive”, Valve explained in a blog post. There you find a language menu to switch the review language from the default.
You can now view all reviews regardless of language by selecting “All Languages” from the language dropdown in the reviews tab of the Community Hub for the game.
All the old reviews will remain of course, you’ll just need to dig through some of the newer ones to see them.
Valve will also be changing up the way it handles the overall user review score, which ranges from the abysmal “Overwhelmingly Negative” to the highly sought after “Overwhelmingly Positive”.
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Now You: Do you read reviews before buying games?
