Today, Valve is changing the way user reviews are sorted and displayed on Steam with a new update, an attempt by the company to hide all the joke reviews and memes that are flooding the digital storefront.
For over 10 yearsPlayers have been able to leave text reviews for games on Steam. These reviews can be long or short, positive or negative, and are intended to help people decide whether to invest time and money in a given game. However, in recent years, The Steam store page was flooded with joke reviews. Basically useless stuff. Now Valve has had enough and is making some changes that should reduce the number of joke and meme reviews.
On August 14th, Valve posted a news blog post: Valve has announced plans to update Steam Reviews as part of an effort to make them more useful. Valve says the “primary goal” of Steam Reviews is to “help potential players make informed decisions about games they want to buy.” But the current system where players vote on which reviews are “helpful” just doesn’t work. So Valve will start making it harder to identify and view “unhelpful” reviews.
According to Valve, “single-word reviews, reviews consisting of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and inside jokes” are now considered unhelpful and will be “sorted behind other reviews on game store pages.”
How does Valve identify unhelpful joke reviews?
Valve says players will still see “humorous but unhelpful” reviews, but the goal is for them to appear much less frequently when people are trying to learn more about a game. The company says there will be an option to toggle these silly reviews off for those who like them but still want to see them.
So how does Valve identify unhelpful reviews? The company says it uses Steam moderators, user reports, and some “machine learning algorithms” to flag reviews as unhelpful.
“Our team has found that a significant number of unhelpful reviews are easy to spot,” Valve said. “That’s why we’re targeting those reviews first. This is a work in progress, and it will take our team some time to evaluate existing reviews and newly posted ones.”
You might be wondering why these unhelpful reviews are left alone. Valve says that “many players want to express their opinions about games” but don’t always have the right words to do so. So they say that these silly reviews are still “valuable data” even though they aren’t traditional reviews.
That’s it. You can still write stupid reviews, but now people don’t have to scroll through 200 reviews telling the same joke to see if a game is good or bad. It’s a smart change, and it seems like a change that was long overdue.
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