Valve would like to better highlight useful user reviews on the Steam gaming platform. In the future, community voting may be manually overwritten by Valve, the Steam operator explains in a blog entry. For example, Valve wants to penalize reviews that consist of only one word or ASCII graphics.
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Helpful reviews already appear at the top of a game’s store page on Steam. The problem: what is useful and what is not is decided by the community alone through their voting. In many cases, this can lead to inside jokes, memes, and other in-jokes being considered useful and displayed at the top, even if they may not make sense to potential new customers.
“Such content is usually fine and brings a lot of joy to existing customers, but it’s not helpful for potential new players who are trying to make informed purchasing decisions.” Valve explains in a blog entry. Steam Operator therefore intends to intervene in the future to help determine the order of user reviews displayed.
AI & Moderation Team
In its blog post, Valve calls out one-word reviews, ASCII graphics, “playful memes,” and inside jokes, which Valve plans to display below. Valve uses AI to automatically detect some cases. In addition, users can report reviews they believe are not helpful, and then a moderation team will deal with them. “We have found over time that many unhelpful reviews are easy to identify,” Valve writes. Such reviews should not be deleted, but displayed below.
Valve stressed that the new ranking system has no effect on user scores. Only the order of displayed reviews has been changed. Users also have the option to turn off the new ranking system. You will need to set it up individually for each game, Valve writes.
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