Steam Wants Gamers to Review Their Reviews After Longer Playtime
This should help clean up the review mess a little. Just a little.
It appears that Steam is asking players who have reviewed games to revise their reviews after added playtime, as reported by PCGamesN. Although not logged in the changelog, the feature was first observed by a Reddit user, and Valve UI designer Alden Kroll also confirmed it on Twitter.
Thankfully, the feature doesn't look invasive, based on the screenshot posted on Reddit. It only shows up on the game page when browsing to the game in your library. The text on the photo reads “You’ve played an additional 93 hours. Would you like to revise your review?”
This could help clean up reviews on Steam somewhat, as they’re known to include reviews from users bashing the developer or issues related to their purchase. Players who get frustrated in the early hours can also negatively affect reviews, so it makes sense to ask users to review their review after they’ve put a solid number of hours in.
Of course, Valve has been fighting this ‘irrelevant review’ battle for longer, giving users the ability to flag reviews and sort reviews based on playtime. Of course, this requires active effort, and many of us just skim the review page briefly before deciding whether or not to make a purchase. This change probably won’t improve the situation drastically, but it should help contribute to forming a nicer community.
If you don't mind the spooky world of game reviews though, consider having a look at the Steam Halloween sale.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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Olle P Seems like a good idea. Not only should the reviewer have played the game for an extended time, there should also have gone a significant time after the game's initial release.Reply
Poor early reviews should be altered if bugs are fixed and/or new content is provided some time later.
Likewise games that are fairly good initially may nowadays become plagued with in-game purchases and generally worsen over time. -
coolitic What review mess? Let people speak their minds. If they want to bash devs when they think devs do bad things, let em. Not that this change really affects that at all btw.Reply -
Jake Hall The only reviews that should be "cleaned up" are those regarding individual technical issues unrelated to the game, or those that don't elaborate. Maybe set an input minimum. IMO, negative reviews seem to be increasingly justified, due to trashy development and production, where profit is the goal instead of art-form. (ie. FC5, Wolfenstein Youngblood and Rage 2). Everyone wants a good gameReply