Valve is making a big change to Steam store pages, specifically in the user reviews section. When checking out the games available on the PC games store, many users gravitate towards checking out what other owners have to say about the experience. However, the user reviews that tended to stick out, especially in popular games, are memes, jokes, or things like ASCII art. Now, Valve is deprioritizing those kinds of reviews.
"With today's Steam update, we are ready for public testing of 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," says today's announcement blog post by Valve.
While the original version had Steam reviews with the most "helpful" votes floating to the top, this had populated most of the user review space with the aforementioned memes, in-jokes, and one-word comments. "That content is usually fine, and often a lot of fun for existing customers of a game, but it doesn't always help new players in making informed purchasing decisions," adds Valve.
It may seem like a drastic change, but Valve also says that this will not change how review scores are generated for each game, just what's displayed at the top. The company is detecting uninformative reviews using manual moderation, user reports, and machine learning algorithms. It also said that Steam is now hosting over 140 million user reviews within its store pages.
As for why Valve isn't simply deleting these "unhelpful" comments about games from some, it says that even those users are giving accurate expressions, adding that "their indication of whether they would recommend the game is still valuable data, even if they are not able to articulate why.
The new system is enabled by default for all Steam users. However, those who want the memes back can be re-enabled by toggling the "helpfulness system" tick in the reviews section for each game.
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