Steam User Reviews Can Now Be Helpful
“Good.” “I also found a team and a fortress.” And one review is a full transcript of Valve’s Meet the Heavy video. These were the best user reviews Steam showed me about the popular game Team Fortress 2 , at least until I turned on the “Use new help system” filter.
Steam, a popular computer games store, has a small problem with memes. Users love leaving humorous reviews of games so much that there is an official filter that shows “funny” reviews, and while this can be useful for jokes, one-word reviews and the like aren’t always useful for people who want to buy a game in the first place.
That’s why today Valve updated Steam with a “New Help System” that tries to display content with more effort.
In a post on its website , Valve said it was “ready to publicly test a new system that changes the way Steam user reviews are sorted on store pages.” The new system will prioritize “reviews that can best help players make a game purchase decision,” filtering out “one-word reviews, reviews that consist of ASCII images, or reviews that are primarily humorous memes and jokes.” .
The company says some humorous reviews will still appear, but potential players should “see them less often when trying to learn about the game.”
This change was generally well received on X and was celebrated by game developers . Of particular note is a post by Matthew Castle, who previously co-hosted the Mystery Steam Reviews series for Rock Paper Shotgun. According to Castle, who has reviewed hundreds of Steam reviews over the years, “There is no community as unfunny as Steam reviewers.”
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However, all hope is not lost for those who still want to win t3h Internet. While the new help system is enabled by default, users can disable the filter in the Show section above the list of user reviews to revert to the old sorting method. The new filter also only applies to the Summary and Most Helpful views, so using the Funny or Latest views will also disable the system.
Hopefully this decision will make everyone happy, while giving developers a better chance of reading genuine user reviews and potential buyers a clearer idea of what they’re getting into.
Valve says its categorization methods include user reports, machine learning and human judgment. The company also clarified that it does not remove reviews that are categorized as unhelpful, so that players who want to give their opinion about the game but don’t want to write much can still do so using the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons that will still be available. is taken into account in the total number of user reviews about the game.
Whether this will continue in the face of review bombing , which involves coordinated campaigns to lower user review scores that may not reflect the feelings of the average gamer, remains to be seen.