Summary
If you useSteam, you’re probably familiar with the experience of going to a game’s store page, clicking through to the reviews, and seeing them inundated with jokes, ASCII art, and other generally unhelpful posts that are definitelynotreviews. Depending on how popular and/or memey the game is, you might have to sift through a lot of these before you find anything useful that will help you decide if you actually want to buy something or not.
It wasrumoured last weekthatValvewas working on a new “helpfulness system” to help users filter out reviews to find actual, thoughtful ones, and Valve has now officially announced that the rumours were true. Ina blog post, Valve said that while jokes, memes, art, and the like are fine, they aren’t helpful. While there was already a system that allowed users to vote on the most ‘helpful’ reviews, the new system will filter and sort these reviews behind other reviews so you’ll see them less frequently.
You can still see these reviews; they’re not being hidden. If you happen to like them, you can toggle an option on the store page to include them while you browse.
This is the best possible outcome – filtering these out for all users while still offering the option to see them is a great middle ground. I personally don’t really look at reviews on Steam unless I’m digging for a specific complaint, because of all the fluff I’ll have to trawl through to find what I want, and this makes the review system much more useful to the vast majority of players.
That being said, there are lots of players who do take the time to write in-depth, thoughtful, comprehensive reviews for games on the platform, and I salute them. Those reviews can be very helpful, though they’re almost never as detailed as those written by critics, for obvious reasons. I personally rarely review games on Steam, because I do that for a living and I’m not going to spend my free time doing it for no pay, but when I do, I write very short sentences. I am one of the people who would likely be filtered by Steam, and I’m fine with that. I’m glad that people who do write reviews won’t be wasting their time or energy from being buried by one-word in-jokes.
That said, these joke reviews definitely have a place on Steam’s platform, which is why I’m especially relieved that they won’t be hidden or deleted altogether. Very often these joke reviews reference things that happen inside the game, particularly funny lines, or organically community-driven memeing. They’re indicative of the things that people love about the game, the community that’s developed around it, and more importantly, they’re usually attached to a thumbs up score that will boost the game in Steam’s algorithm and put it in front of more players.
Not everybody has the time or inclination to write long screeds about why they love a game, but a throwaway joke about the game itself shows that they want to help the developers out with a positive review,andthat they’re very engaged with it. In a way, having a ton of positive joke reviews on a game can be a good thing, because it shows that the game matters to people enough that there’s a community culture around it.
Even the negative joke reviews can be pretty helpful, because they highlight the most annoying things about the game right off the bat. For example, I haveDragon Age 2’s store page open right now, because I was checking to see if I’d bought the DLC on Steam. Going to the reviews, turning off the helpfulness filter, and looking at the negative reviews brings up people saying variations of “I hate the Origin app”, but funnier – one person said “The EA app is an Archdemon”. They also tell me that the DLC doesn’t work for a lot of people, and I might have enough problems getting it to work likewith Dragon Age: Origins, I’ll have to fall back on the console version.
Do I necessarily want these jokes to be the first thing I see when I go into a game’s reviews? No, but it’s very easy to toggle the filter on and off. This is a great change to Valve’s review system. I’m not sure I’ll default to Steam reviews from now on, but at least I’ll be more willing to dive into them.
Steam
Owned by Valve, Steam is a digital storefront and library for PC games. With many sales, updates, account functionality, and compatibility with many different platforms — as well as streaming options and its own Steam Deck handheld - it remains one of the biggest storefronts for PC gamers.
