Your funny Steam reviews might be in trouble

By Carli Velocci August 15, 2024

A Steam library filled with custom artwork. — Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Steam is introducing a new system to improve the “helpfulness” of user reviews on its platforms, and it may spell bad news for your sass and one-word jokes.

Valve posted a platform update Wednesday, and along with the usual patches and bug fixes, it introduced the beta for a user review system, which is now on by default during its testing period. It seeks to rank reviews by quality, moving comments that help people with making a buying decision up and pushing jokey ones down.

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The company says this is being done through a combination of user reporting and machine learning, although it’s a work in progress. Some users might leave a helpful review that’s only a word or two, for example, so using an algorithm isn’t a perfect solution.

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Note that Steam isn’t getting rid of your ability to make memes in the reviews section entirely. “User reviews that are identified as being unhelpful for potential customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes, will be sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page,” a post explaining the change states. “That doesn’t mean players won’t ever see these humorous, but unhelpful posts, but it hopefully means that they’ll see them less frequently when trying to learn about a game.”

So, if you want to see these so-called unhelpful reviews, you can toggle the setting off by going to Display above the user reviews for each game and toggling off Use new helpfulness system. If you like the system, you can report reviews you see.

Steam is cracking down on unhelpful or unrelated content across its platform. On Tuesday, Valve announced new rules for store page descriptions that are rolling out in September and prohibit links to other websites or games on Steam unless they’re in the dedicated sections. This is to cut down on player confusion and generally bad descriptions overall. These are some of the many changes being made to Steam as of late, which also include more streamlined Steam Family features and native Game Recording, which is now in beta.

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Contributor, Games

Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…

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