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The whole point of reviews, whether professionally written or written by users, is to help others make informed choices. Should I go to see that movie? Should I eat at that restaurant? Is this game worth paying for on Steam? And on that last point, Valve has a plan.
Valve Tests a New Helpfulness System for Reviews
With its latest Steam update, Valve is publicly testinga new Helpfulness System for reviews.
This, as the name suggests, prioritizes helpfulness over everything else when it comes to Steam reviews. The idea being to promote the user reviews that “best help players make a purchase decision about the game”.
The system is now enabled by default, but can be toggled on or off for each game. So, those of you who are less interested in genuinely helpful reviews, and who are only there for the jokes, memes, andASCII art (which you can even create in your Linux terminal)can still view the fun nonsense.
Helping People Know What Games to Purchase
Valve has correctly identified that user reviews should primarily exist to help people make purchasing decisions. However, given the nature of the Steam community, and the old system where game reviews were sorted by vote counts, one-word reviews, jokes, memes, and ASCII art would often make it to the top, pushing down proper reviews of the games.
As well as using reviews to make purchasing decisions, you should considerleaving a Steam reviewtoo.
While Valve is happy to accommodate this nonsense, it doesn’t want to promote and prioritize it over genuine reviews that could help people know whether to buy a game. Hence, the new helpfulness system. So, while they will still be visible, they will be sorted further down a game’s store page behind other, more serious reviews.
Valve is keen to point out that this new system won’t impact a game’s score, but that this is still very much a work in progress. The system will sort reviews based on a mixture of user reports, machine learning algorithms, and moderators manually checking.
Take Your Jokes, Memes, and ASCII Art Elsewhere
This seems like a solid, and possibly overdue, update. Because, while there should be a place for jokes, memes, and ASCII art, that should never be prioritized ahead of genuine reviews that actually help people decide what to spend their hard-earned cash on.
I expect Steam users to push back on this a little by trying to ensure in-jokes still make it to the top of reviews. But ultimately, I can’t fault Valve for trying to keep its community in check. And as someone who takes pleasure inreviewing businesses on Google Maps, I appreciate the efforts of people who write genuine reviews to help others.
