Valve's Steam Reviews Now in Beta
Steam users can now leave reviews.
A new Reviews section has popped up on Steam, allowing Steam members to share their opinions about games bought and/or played on the platform. Steam Reviews is an evolution of the Recommendation system that has been a part of Steam since 2010.
According to company, consumers considering a purchase on Steam can browse reviews from friends and the community, leave comments on reviews, and indicate which review was deemed helpful. Once a customer plays a game or uses software sold on Steam, they can write a review of that product.
"Over the past few years, Steam users have written over 7 million Recommendations of games and software to their friends," reads Valve’s email. "Those Recommendations have been upgraded to Steam Reviews. As such, users may now choose to make their past Recommendations visible as Reviews to everyone on Steam, if they wish, by visiting their list of Reviews and changing the settings accordingly."
For now, the review scores will not aggregate into a single, overall score. However an FAQ indicates that it should become part of the reviewing system while Reviews is still in beta. So far there's no indication of when Reviews will come out of the current beta phase.
"Many products on Steam change significantly over time as the game or software is updated and new content is added," reads the official FAQ. "In order to form a score that accurately reflects the current state of a product, we first need to gather and evaluate the data from reviews."
The FAQ also reveals that developers can respond directly to reviews in the comments section: the response will be flagged. However developers cannot directly delete reviews of a product obviously so that game makers aren’t thinning out all the negativity on purpose.
“If you find abusive or offensive reviews written about your product, you can flag it as spam/abuse. The review will continue to be listed on your store page, but in a collapsed form and marked as spam until a moderator can either delete the review or remove the spam flag,” the FAQ states.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
For more information about the new Reviews section, head here.
Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
-
rad666 Actual user reviews on the store page, and not "friend" recommendations (who reads those anyway?), is a great step for Valve/Steam to take. Glad to see it.Reply -
biohazrdfear Steam Reviews have been around for a long, long time. Not sure what is new and out of the blue.Reply -
jimmysmitty Reply12038352 said:Steam Reviews have been around for a long, long time. Not sure what is new and out of the blue.
I think you are thinking of Recommendations. This is more than just recommending. This is something people can look up on the games store page to see if they feel it is worth the purchase or not. -
southernshark Well they have had the forums for years. I always check those before I make a questionable purchase. Obviously some games come along that you know that you are going to buy, but others you just don't know enough about. Still though, any new opportunity to read user feedback will be welcome, even though reviews lack the true user feedback that one cant obtain in a forum.Reply -
cats_Paw Might be helpfull, especially since people can warn you not to buy console ports that are horrible on PC (Like Dark Souls), or at least, point you in the right direction where to find a patch, official or not, for the game.Reply