Steam: Valve wants to make user reviews more useful
More relevant reviews, fewer memes: Valve wants to revise the anecdotes of user reviews on Steam.
Steam reviews should become more useful.
(Image: Rokas Tenys/Shutterstock.com)
Valve wants to better highlight useful user reviews on the Steam gaming platform. To this end, the community voting can be manually overwritten by Valve in the future, the Steam operator explains in a blog entry. For example, Valve wants to penalize reviews that consist of just one word or ASCII graphics.
Helpful reviews are already displayed at the top of a game's store page on Steam. The problem is that the community alone decides what is useful and what is not by voting. Often, this can lead to insider gags, memes and other quips being rated as helpful and displayed at the top, even though they are incomprehensible to potential new customers.
"Such content is usually fine and brings a lot of joy to existing customers. However, they are not helpful for potential new players trying to make informed purchasing decisions," Valve states in a blog entry. The Steam operator therefore wants to intervene itself in future to help determine the order in which user reviews are displayed.
AI and moderation team
In its blog entry, Valve calls reviews with just one word, ASCII graphics "playful memes" and insider jokes that Valve aims to display further down. Valve uses AI to recognize some cases automatically. In addition, users can report reviews that they consider unhelpful and a moderation team will deal with them. "Over time, we've found that many less helpful reviews are easy to spot," writes Valve. Such reviews will not be removed, but will be displayed further down.
The new ranking system has no effect on the user score, Valve emphasizes. Only the order in which reviews are displayed will be changed. Users also have the option of switching off the new ranking system. This must be set individually for each game, Valve writes.
(dahe)