The review system of Steam has been something akin to a guiding light of which there are a multitude of games that is being released on Valve’s game shop on a daily basis. When an update for these games are launched, older reviews are found to be less relevant. Now, the game platform holder has now made a number of small, but still significant, changes to the way how reviews and ratings from users are displayed as well as how they are calculated on the Steam store pages.
The Steam Review System Has Been Updated to Provide Better Insight on Games
The update brought towards the Steam Review system aims to adjust the fluctuating nature of titles which are ever evolving through multiple services such as the likes of those who opt for Early Access, or to gamers who have seen a great impact on titles after the release of certain patches for their favorite games.
Valve announced in a post on the Steampowered page that they have introduced a “Recent review score,” in which it will calculate the percentage of reviews in the span of a month. As for the overall user review score, it will be categorized as “Mixed,” as 60-percent of the reviews found in this sector are being positive.
With the use of a “Recent review score,” it uses the same calculation but just in the span of the past 30 days, provided that the game has already been inside the gaming platform for 45 days or more as well as if the there are already enough reviews within the aforementioned 30-day window in order for the game to create a useful score calculation.
This makes it easier for gamers to read more recent reviews of a particular title which would better reflect the game’s current state. This is especially useful for games that are found to have Early Access subscriptions, as these titles would be more or less incomplete when they are released. Reading through the more recent reviews will allow more helpful insight for interested people if they would purchase the game or not. There are also additional review filtering options that are included in the update, such as the option to filter certain languages. There is also a “summary” tab wherein it brings together the most helpful and the most recent reviews that were posted.
When using the new Steam Review system, you can select all languages to display the reviews in, well, that were written in various languages. Prior to the update rolling out, you can be faced with a page full of negative reviews that are from users complaining about certain problems that, in the time they posted these, were still a problem but are now fixed.