Steam Launches New Review Value System to Prioritize Helpful Reviews

TapTechNews August 15th news, at 2 a.m. Beijing time early this morning, Steam announced through an official announcement the launch of a brand-new Review Value System and started a public test as of today. According to the introduction, this system will change the way Steam sorts user reviews on the store page, aiming to prioritize those that can most effectively help players make purchasing decisions. The system will be enabled by default and can be toggled in the user review settings of each game.

All along, we have been sorting each review by the number of valuable votes given by other players. However, we see that many players use reviews to share jokes, memes, ASCII art, and other content that may not be the most helpful for potential buyers.

These contents are usually harmless and often quite interesting for existing customers of the game, but this kind of content can't always help new players make informed purchase decisions.

TapTechNews learned from the announcement that reviews that are identified as less helpful to potential customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews consisting of ASCII art, or those mainly playing with memes and telling inside jokes, will be ranked behind other reviews on the game's store page. This doesn't mean players will never see these humorous (but useless) posts, but hopefully it means they will see fewer of these reviews when trying to understand the game.

Steam said that if players like to see these (humorous) reviews when browsing the store, they can choose the display mode including such reviews on the store page. This change will not affect the generation way of the review score of each game; it just changes the order in which they appear on each store page.

According to the introduction, as of now, Steam players have posted more than 140 million user reviews.

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