Steam reviews It tends to be a mix of serious, helpful, jokey, and meme-y, but Valve wants to change that mood a bit. The company started operating open trial a new “usefulness” system that will effectively push useful reviews to the top and fun ones down, depending on what the user wants to see.
“User reviews determined to be unhelpful to potential customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews containing ASCII art, or reviews that are mostly playful memes and jokes, will be ranked behind other reviews on the game’s store page,” the company said.
The new “utility” button is enabled by default and only works when you’re in the “summary” and “most useful” views. When enabled, you’ll see reviews with the highest helpfulness scores at the top, with funny but relatively useless reviews at the bottom. Unchecking the helper box will bring back Steam’s old browsing system.
Both negative and positive comments are evaluated through AI algorithms, user reports, and Steam’s moderators. In the FAQ, Steam said that it will “take a long time” to evaluate the more than 140 million existing reviews, and longer for those that have been posted recently.
“That’s not to say that players will never see…humorous but useless posts, but hopefully they’ll see them less often when they’re trying to learn about the game,” Valve said. “The main purpose of Steam User Reviews is to help potential players make informed decisions about the games they are considering purchasing.”
