Steam - Updates Customer Review System

HiddenX

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Steam has updated the customer review system again - freely received games are not counting for the total review score anymore:

More Updates to The Steam Customer Review System

[...]

Changes To The Review Score

As a result of this, we are making some changes to how review scores are calculated. As of today, the recent and overall review scores we show at the top of a product page will no longer include reviews written by customers that activated the game through a Steam product key.

Customers that received the game from a source outside of Steam (e.g. via a giveaway site, purchased from another digital or retail store, or received for testing purposes from the developer) will still be able to write a review of the game on Steam to share their experience. These reviews will still be visible on the store page, but they will no longer contribute to the score.

This does mean that the review score category shown for about 14% of games will change; some up and some down. Most changes in the review score category are a result of games being on the edge of review score cut-offs such as 69% positive or 70% positive. A change of 1% in these cases can mean the difference between a review score category of "Mixed" and "Positive". About 200 titles that only had one or two reviews will no longer have a score at all until a review is written by a customer that purchased that item via Steam. In all of these cases, the written reviews still exist and can easily be found in the review section on that store page.

[...]
More information.
 
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I'm not certain about this. I know steam keys can be open to abuse but by the same token, I'm someone who often purchases on other platforms and would like my rating to contribute to the score. That said, I don't have a better idea of how to address this problem - and I often rely on well-written user reviews to get a better sense of how good or bad the game is. So maybe this is a good idea overall.
 
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I agree with you. I've got a good number of keys from Kickstarter, for example. On the other hand where it will probably help preventing abuse the most is from small indies who give out keys in exchange for positive reviews. I honestly check both the over rating and written reviews. However, I am willing to purchase a game with "mixed" reviews, if I find the negative reviews highlight issues I don't care about. I'd say though that very negative or positive reviews may influence how much money I'd be willing to spend on a game though.
 
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Weird choice. More censorship I guess. I assume in the end, we wont be able to rate games at all, haha. :D :p
 
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It's hardly censorship, as reviews written by people who received the game from outside sources will still be published. They've just changed how the overall ratings are calculated.
 
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They may not like bad reviews but the reality is they all wash out in the end. If something is fun, its fun and it will rise to the top.

It also keeps overrated games grounded.

I'm curious if this counts to FTP games because most of them are PTW.
 
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◾There are some titles where a small group of users are able to consistently mark specific reviews as helpful, and as a result can present a skewed perception of what customers are saying about the game. This is obviously not ideal, so we're looking at ways to ensure that a few users don't have outsized influence over the system.
Thank goodness. I hope they do something fairly soon about this and the other 'next steps' points.

(And then do something about people spamming screenshots. "I don't want to learn how to make a video so I'll just hammer the screenshot key then upload all 432 screenshots at once!" Ugh. So much for the 'recent' list for that day.)
 
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I don't really care, TBH. These user scores are often skewed by some tantrum that the hivemind has thrown about some nonsense or other. I just look at the written reviews that appear not to have been composed by a caffeinated problem child.
 
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I usually can't get my answers on steam reviews.
For example, when it's a port, noone writes about controls nor thumbs games down when ports suck.
So I always have to ask on steam forums if K+M works properly or risk buying to check it myself.

Thus I don't care about steam's total score system at all.
It'd be better if they revamped it into checkboxes style. So users tick on "1st perspective", "turnbased", "repetitive", "pay2win", "broken piece of s", etc. We wouldn't need positive/negative thing, we'd check boxes we're interested in and base our purchases on that - see some people didn't refund Arkham Knight because to them bugs don't matter.
 
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I usually can't get my answers on steam reviews.
For example, when it's a port, noone writes about controls nor thumbs games down when ports suck.
So I always have to ask on steam forums if K+M works properly or risk buying to check it myself.

Thus I don't care about steam's total score system at all.
It'd be better if they revamped it into checkboxes style. So users tick on "1st perspective", "turnbased", "repetitive", "pay2win", "broken piece of s", etc. We wouldn't need positive/negative thing, we'd check boxes we're interested in and base our purchases on that - see some people didn't refund Arkham Knight because to them bugs don't matter.

If Steam had a separate technical score that would be cool. Not sure how it would work through.
 
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It's hardly censorship, as reviews written by people who received the game from outside sources will still be published. They've just changed how the overall ratings are calculated.
It's not censorship per se, but it is manipulation of game ratings in a pretty screwy way. It doesn't just eliminate the bogus positive reviews they're worried about but eliminates tons of legit reviews as well. For many games, the biggest fans (the ones most likely to give a positive review) normally participate in the Kickstarter/Fig/whatever and get their keys for "free" (from Steam's point of view). Now the Steam rating will disregard the rating of everyone who Kickstarted/Fig'ed a game, presumably dragging down the overall rating on all those games to some degree.
 
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Based upon their data, what this does do is remove a source of negative ratings bias toward games that are never given away, so that part seems fair. It levels the playing field across all of the games.
 
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what this does do is remove a source of negative ratings bias toward games that are never given away

How so?
 
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Does anyone actually put that much stock into whether a game is rated "positive" or "mostly positive?" I know I am actually reading the reviews themselves and mentally discarding many as I go, for example, the ones participating in the hivemind Ripper mentioned above.
 
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Does anyone actually put that much stock into whether a game is rated "positive" or "mostly positive?" I know I am actually reading the reviews themselves and mentally discarding many as I go, for example, the ones participating in the hivemind Ripper mentioned above.

I definitely put a lot of stock into the difference between "very positive" and "mostly positive", though only for indie games. It's been my experience that indie games rated "mostly positive" often have issues. So I tend to avoid them, unless I have a very compelling reason not to.

A "positive" rating is different from "very positive" though. That just means that the game hasn't received enough ratings yet to judge how popular it is. I treat that with caution too.

For AAA games Steam ratings are often meaningless because people carry so much baggage into their ratings.
 
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It's a zero-sum game. If games that are given away receive a positive review bias, then by the same token games that are never given away suffer for it. On average, the reviews of the latter will seem more negative because of the same bias.
 
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I don't really care, TBH. These user scores are often skewed by some tantrum that the hivemind has thrown about some nonsense or other. I just look at the written reviews that appear not to have been composed by a caffeinated problem child.

THIS. God, it makes my skin crawl when the moron hivemind decide that a developer deserves to be bankrupted because they removed the posts of some extremely abusive troll. Makes me wish for the halcyon days of AOL Online and Netscape Navigator.
 
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