Valve is changing how user reviews are sorted and displayed on Steam with a new update released today. The company is taking the step to hide all the joke reviews and memes that have been flooding the digital storefront.
For over ten yearsgamers used to be able to leave text reviews for games on Steam. These reviews can be long or short, positive or negative, and are intended to help people decide whether they want to invest their time and money into a particular game. However, in recent years Steam store pages are flooded with joke reviews which is basically useless. Now, Valve has said enough and is making some changes that could lead to fewer jokes and meme reviews.
Valve published a news blog on August 14 Regarding plans to update Steam reviews to make them more helpful, Valve says that 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 of players voting on which reviews are “helpful” doesn't work. So Valve will start identifying “unhelpful” reviews and making them harder to see.
According to Valve, “reviews that are one-word reviews, ASCII art reviews, or mostly funny memes and jokes” will now be considered useless and “will be ranked behind other reviews on the game's store page.”
How does Valve identify unhelpful, jokey comments?
Valve explains that players will still be able to see “funny but unhelpful” reviews, but the goal is for them to appear much less frequently when people are simply trying to learn more about a game. The company says there will be an option you can turn on for those who like these ridiculous reviews and still want to see them.
So how will Valve determine unhelpful comments? The company says that comments will be flagged as unhelpful using Steam moderators, user reports, and some “machine learning algorithms.”
“Our team found that many unhelpful reviews are easy to spot,” Valve said. “That's why we're targeting them first. This is a work in progress and will likely take our team a fair amount of time to evaluate existing reviews and newly submitted reviews.”
You might be wondering, why are you leaving these useless reviews up? Valve says that “many players want to express an opinion about a game” but can't always find the right words to do so. So, it says that these silly reviews are “valuable data” even if they aren't traditional reviews.
There you have it. You can still do your stupid reviews, but now people won't have to read 200 of them making the same joke to see if the game is any good. This seems like a smart change and it's been needed for a long time.
.