Today, in a new update, Valve is changing how it sorts and displays user reviews on Steam in an attempt by the company to hide all the joke reviews and memes that are flooding the digital storefront.
For over a decade now, players have been able to leave text reviews for games on Steam. These reviews could be long or short, positive or negative, and are intended to help people decide if they want to invest time and money in a given game. However, in recent years Steam store pages have become flooded by joke reviews that are basically useless. Now, Valve has had enough and is making some changes that might lead to fewer joke and meme reviews.
On August 14, Valve published a news blog about its plans to update Steam reviews in an effort to make them more helpful. Valve says the “primary goal” of Steam reviews is to “help potential players make informed decisions” about games they might want to buy. But the current system, where players vote on which reviews are “helpful,” isn’t working. So Valve is going to start identifying “unhelpful” reviews and make them harder to see.
According to Valve, “one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes” will now be considered unhelpful and will be “sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page.”
How is Valve identifying unhelpful, joke reviews?
Valve clarifies that players might still see “humorous, but unhelpful” reviews, but the goal is that they show up far less often when people are just trying to learn more about a game. The company says there will be an option you can toggle on for those who like these silly reviews and still want to see them.
So how will Valve identify unhelpful reviews? The company says reviews will be marked unhelpful using Steam moderators, user reports, and some “machine learning algorithms.”
“Our team has found that a lot of the unhelpful reviews were easy to spot,” said Valve. “So we’re targeting those first. This is a work in process, and will likely take quite a while for our team to evaluate the existing reviews and newly posted reviews.”
You might be wondering, why even leave these unhelpful reviews up? Valve says that it’s found that “many players want to express an opinion about the game” but they don’t always have the right words to do so. So it says these sillier reviews are still “valuable data,” even if they aren’t traditional reviews.
There you go. You can still do your silly reviews, but now people won’t have to scroll through 200 of them making the same joke just to see if the game is good or not. This seems like a smart change and one which has long been overdue.
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