Valve cracks down on joke reviews flooding Steam

Today, Valve is changing the way user reviews are sorted and displayed on Steam in a new update, in an effort to hide all the funny reviews and memes that clutter its digital storefront.

For more than a decadePlayers could leave text reviews for games on Steam. These reviews could be long or short, positive or negative, and were intended to help people decide whether to invest time and money in a particular game. However, in recent years Steam store pages are flooded with funny reviews which are basically useless. Valve has had enough of this and is making some changes that could lead to less joke and meme reviews.

On August 14, Valve published a news blog about its plans to update Steam reviews in an effort to make them more useful. Valve says the “primary goal” of Steam reviews is to “help potential players make informed decisions” about games they might want to buy. But the current system, where players vote on which reviews are “helpful,” isn’t working. So Valve is going to identify “non-helpful” reviews and make them harder to see.

According to Valve, “one-word reviews, reviews consisting of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and inside jokes” will now be considered unhelpful and “will be placed behind other reviews on the game’s store page.”

How does Valve identify useless, funny reviews?

Valve clarifies that players will still be able to see “humorous but pointless” reviews, but the goal is for them to appear much less often when people are just trying to learn more about a game. The company says there will be an option to turn them on for those who find these silly reviews amusing and still want to see them.

How will Valve identify unhelpful reviews? The company says reviews will be marked as unhelpful using Steam moderators, user reports, and some “machine learning algorithms.”

“Our team found that many of the unhelpful reviews were easy to spot,” Valve said. “So we’re focusing on those first. This is a work in progress and it will likely take some time for our team to review existing reviews and newly posted reviews.”

You might be wondering, why even allow these useless reviews to be up? Valve says it’s found that “a lot of players want to express their opinions about the game,” but they don’t always have the right words to do so. So it says these dumber reviews are still “valuable data,” even if they’re not traditional reviews.

There you have it. You can still write your dumb reviews, but people don’t have to scroll through 200 reviews that make the same joke to see if the game is any good or not. This seems like a smart change and one that is long overdue.

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