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Valve switches up its Steam review policy, again

For the second time in as many weeks Valve has changed the way Steam’s review system works.

With the changes implemented last week, only reviews from users who had bought a game through Steam would have their review counted towards that game’s review score.

This meant that if you bought a game as part of a Humble Bundle, or backed it on Kickstarter, not only would your review not count towards its overall score on the Steam page but also the review wouldn’t even feature.

Valve said at the time, “An analysis of games across Steam shows that at least 160 titles have a substantially greater percentage of positive reviews by users that activated the product with a cd key, compared to customers that purchased the game directly on Steam.”

The firm went on to say that while this doesn’t always lead to abuse of the review system, it could.

“In those cases, we’ve now taken action by banning the false reviews and will be ending business relationships with developers that continue violating our rules,” it said.

Now, a week later, Valve has walked back its stance, slightly. Should somebody review a game they bought through a platform other than Steam, the review will be shown.

“By default you’ll now see reviews written by all players of the game, including Steam customers, Kickstarter backers, bundle customers, streamers, and other users that acquired the game outside of Steam,” Valve said. Users are also able to filter reviews by whether they were purchased through Steam, another platform or both.

However, the score of the game will still only be determined by reviews written by those who bought the game through Steam.

Valve is listening and adapting

This is definitely an improvement on the changes implemented last week but smaller developers, who rely on positive reviews to get seen by gamers, may still suffer. Many developers rely on positive reviews from its fan base to get a bump from Steam’s search algorithm, if your Kickstarters aren’t able to score a game and that’s your most ardent fan base, which may be a problem.

This change is not the end of the story though. Valve is aware of the flaws in its system and has said that tweaking Steam reviews to be more helpful and effective is a “work in progress” and other parts of the system are being looked at as well.

“Sometimes unhelpful memes get rated as ‘helpful’ because people think it’s funny. So we’re working on updating the system to consider more factors when deciding how to rank ‘helpful’ reviews so that it can generate better results. We plan on rolling out a beta soon, which you’ll be able to opt into so you can compare the sorting of helpful reviews before and after the change,” the developer concluded.

[Source – Steam]

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