Today, Valve is changing the way user reviews are sorted and displayed on Steam in a new update, in an attempt to hide all the joke reviews and memes that flood the digital storefront.
For over a decadeplayers could leave text reviews for games on Steam. These reviews could be long or short, positive or negative, and were designed to help people decide whether they wanted to invest time and money in a particular game. In recent years Steam store pages flooded with joke reviews
On August 14, Valve published a news blog about its 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 games they may want to buy. But the current system of players voting on which reviews are “helpful” isn’t working, so Valve will start identifying “unhelpful” reviews and making them harder to see.
According to Valve, “one-word reviews, reviews consisting of ASCII art, or reviews that consist primarily of gameplay memes and inside jokes” will now be considered unhelpful and “sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page.”
How does Valve detect unhelpful, humorous reviews?
Valve clarifies that players may still see “humorous but unhelpful” reviews, but the goal is to make them appear much less frequently when people are just trying to learn more about a game. The company says there will be an option you can enable if you like these silly reviews and still want to see them.
So how will Valve identify unhelpful reviews? The company says it will flag reviews as unhelpful using Steam moderators, user reports, and some “machine learning algorithms.”
“Our team has found that many of the unhelpful reviews were easy to spot,” Valve said. “So we’re tackling those first. This is an ongoing process and it will likely take our team quite a while to evaluate the existing and newly published reviews.”
You might be wondering why these unhelpful reviews even stay up? Valve says it’s found that “many players want to voice their opinions about the game,” but they don’t always have the right words to do so. As such, it says these sillier reviews are still “valuable data,” even if they’re not traditional reviews.
There you go. You can still write your silly reviews, but now people don’t have to go through 200 reviews with the same joke just to see if the game is good or not. This seems like a smart change that was long overdue.
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