Key Takeaways
- Steam is testing a new review system to prioritize helpful over meme-based reviews.
- Unhelpful reviews will be sorted behind others, impacting the visibility of humorous reviews in order to ensure players can find quality games on Steam.
- You can reverse the change by checking a box on the Store.
Valve is trying to fix Steam’s review system so that reviews become less of a discussion forum in order to make its user ratings more relevant. The real question is, will anyone notice?
What Happened to Steam Reviews?
In an announcement dated August 14, 2024, Steam posted that it is publicly testing “a new system that changes the way Steam sorts user reviews on store pages, with the goal of prioritizing reviews that can best help players make a purchase decision about the game. This new helpfulness system is now enabled by default, and can easily be toggled within the user review settings for each game.”
The “Problem” With Old Steam Reviews
Steam reviews have long been a home to often hilarious game-related memes and jokes. Some have gone viral thanks to the r/SteamReviews dedicated subreddit and thousands of shares on platforms like TikTok.
When gamers appreciate or relate to a funny Steam review, they typically mark it as helpful. Under the previous helpfulness system, the reviews ranked according to helpfulness. So, these amusing reviews would be highly visible. Because this is a big change and many PC gamers love writing and reading those types of “reviews,” this might be a tough change for many to accept.
How Review Rating Now Works on Steam
Going forward, Steam will identify some reviews as unhelpful and sort them behind other reviews. The announcement post claims that unhelpful reviews are one-word reviews, reviews with ASCII art or memes, or “reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes.”
It does not say how “in-jokes” will be determined, and the level of sorting is left vague. Steam says that posts identified as unhelpful will be sorted behind other reviews and that players will still see them, just less frequently. Considering that many games have thousands of reviews, it’s still not clear how this will work.
However, the principle seems reasonable.
Does Marking a Review as “Helpful” Still Matter?
We would be doing readers a disservice if we did not point out this adorable and carefully worded FAQ question from the same Steam post, asking “If you’ve identified a review as unhelpful, why not delete the review?” The answer reads:
“We have found that many players want to express an opinion about the game, but don’t always have the words to describe their experience with the game, or aren’t interested in writing much. Their indication of whether they would recommend the game is still valuable data, even if they are not able to articulate why.”
What an inclusive statement! The review ratings system for games isn’t changing, and reviews marked as helpful will still have some degree of priority. This change only takes place on the store page for a game. If a user clicks “Browse all” reviews, the review page for a game is unchanged.
How to Reverse the Change
To investigate this change, I wanted to use a game that was frequently debated, often used for memes, and would have a lot of reviews. So, I went straight to the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds store page. PUBG is a popular free-to-play shooter released in 2017. The first review was a short complaint about hackers and bots, ending with a reasonable suggestion to developers to adopt anti-cheat tech.
To reverse the change and go back to the old review arrangement, click the “display” drop-down and uncheck the “Use new helpfulness system” option.
I did this on the PUBG page and the review I’d seen was still there, but no longer first. Now, the first review was from a player whose PUBG game experience was ruined by hackers. He was quite upset and gave specific details about how hackers had first killed him and then banned him for 24 hours.
In my opinion, both reviews are helpful. They both raise the issue of cheating and beg for developer solutions. If I had to pick the most helpful between them, I’d give it to the one with the most details. That would be the one hidden by the new helpfulness system.
In fact, all the reviews were similar under both sorting methods except for one. There was one review that was an ASCII-style image unrelated to the game. It was only revealed when the helpfulness box was unchecked. The new system did work for hiding that review, but it also seemed to demote other reviews seemingly for no reason.
Overall, it seems like this change is a case of fixing something that wasn’t broken, but it’s an interesting experiment. We’ll have to keep an eye on Steam reviews to see how the new sorting system evolves in the future. The end goal is to make sure players can find good games on Steam.
