The primary goal of Steam User Reviews is to help potential players make informed decisions about the games they are considering purchasing by understanding the attributes of the game that other players like or don’t like. Historically we’ve sorted reviews by the number of ‘helpful’ votes given to each review by other players. However, we’ve seen that many players use reviews for sharing jokes, memes, ascii art and other content that might not be the most helpful for a potential purchaser. 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.
User reviews that are identified as being unhelpful for potential customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes, will be sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page. That doesn’t mean players won’t ever see these humorous, but unhelpful posts, but it hopefully means that they’ll see them less frequently when trying to learn about a game. If you enjoy seeing these sorts of reviews when browsing the store, there’s an option on the store page to include them when browsing.
This change doesn’t impact how review scores are generated for each game; it is simply changing the order that reviews appear on each store page.
As always, we learn from your feedback, so please feel free to leave a comment below.
Q: How does Steam determine which reviews are not informative?
A: Categorization work is a mix of techniques, including user reports, the Steam moderation team looking closely at a lot of reviews, and some machine learning algorithms to help scale the human judgement calls. Our team has found that a lot of the unhelpful reviews were easy to spot, so we’re targeting those first. This is a work in process, and will likely take quite a while for our team to evaluate the existing reviews and newly posted reviews.
Q: Does it matter anymore if I mark a review as Helpful or not?
A: Marking a review as helpful or not is still taken into account.
Q: Can I help identify reviews that are not informative?
A: Our moderation team looks closer at reviews that are reported by other users, so the best thing you can do is report the review with a brief description of why. Please see Reporting Content in the Steam Community for more details.
Q: How can I compare this new system to what the old one returned?
A: You can easily do so by unselecting the option “Use new helpfulness system” under the “Display” drop-down just above the user reviews.
Q: Does it matter if a review is positive or negative during this evaluation?
A: No, the blue thumbs-up and red thumbs-down are not a factor in deciding whether a review is found to be informative.
Q. Got any interesting trivia about user reviews?
A. Steam players have posted well over 140 Million user reviews to date.
Q. If you’ve identified a review as unhelpful, why not delete the review?
A. 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.
Q. Where can I learn more about the rules for User Reviews on Steam?
A. For more details, please see Rules and Guidelines For Steam: Discussions, Reviews, and User Generated Content
