Today, Valve is rolling out a up-to-date update that changes the way Steam sorts and displays user reviews, in a bid to hide all the joke reviews and memes that flood its digital storefront.
For over a decadeplayers could leave text reviews of games on Steam. These reviews can be long or low, positive or negative, and are intended to assist people decide whether they want to invest time and money in a game. However, in recent years Steam store pages flooded with joke reviews which are essentially useless. Now Valve has had enough and is making changes that could lead to fewer joke and meme reviews.
On August 14, Valve published a blog post with news about plans to update Steam reviews to make them more helpful. Valve says the “primary goal” of Steam reviews is to “help potential players make informed decisions” about the games they want to buy. However, the current system, where players vote on which reviews are “helpful,” doesn’t work. So Valve is going to start identifying “unhelpful” reviews and making them harder to see.
According to Valve, “single-word reviews, reviews consisting of ASCII art, or reviews that are mostly funny memes and jokes” will now be considered unhelpful and “will be grouped with other reviews on the game’s store page.”
How does Valve identify unhelpful, joke reviews?
Valve explains that players may still see “funny but unhelpful” reviews, but the goal is for them to appear much less often when people are simply trying to learn more about the game. The company says there will be an option to turn them on for those who enjoy these silly reviews and still want to see them.
So how will Valve identify unhelpful reviews? The company says reviews will be flagged as unhelpful using Steam moderators, user reports, and some “machine learning algorithms.”
“Our team found that many of the unhelpful reviews were easy to spot,” Valve said. “So we’ll be focusing on those first. This is a process that will likely take our team a significant amount of time to evaluate existing reviews and newly published reviews.”
You might be wondering why they leave these unhelpful reviews in the first place? Valve says it’s discovered that “many players want to voice their opinion on a game,” but don’t always have the words to do so. That’s why it says these dumber reviews are still “valuable data,” even if they’re not time-honored reviews.
There you have it. You can still write your stupid reviews, but now people won’t have to scroll through 200 of them repeating the same joke just to see if the game is good or not. This seems like a astute change that’s been long overdue.
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