Valve Updates Steam Game Review System

In a recent post by Valve, they announced that Steam reviews will be updated to both show a summary of the game’s reviews, but also give more prominence to updated reviews of the game that were made in the last thirty days.

Valve explains the changes as follows.

One common theme we’ve been seeing in customer feedback about the Steam review system is that it isn’t always easy to tell what the current experience is like in a game months after release. This new set of changes released today is designed to better describe the current customer experience in those games. We do this by better exposing the newly posted reviews and by calculating a summary of those recent reviews.

The first big change is an increased visibility for recently posted reviews. In the old system, the most helpful reviews may have been based on an old build of the game and didn’t accurately reflect the current product. But now, the review system will show recently helpful reviews by default to better show the game as it is now.

The second big change is making a recent review score, alongside the overall review score. Previously, the overall review score was only a calculation of the percentage of all reviews that were positive. But that didn’t portray the quality of a game if it changed better over time. But now Valve added a recent review score that calculates the positive percentage of reviews within 30 days (and if the game was on Steam for at least 45 days), to better show the current state of the game.

Valve made other changes, such as a summary tab in the customer review section, a checkbox to disclose if you got a copy of the game for free, and a language interface that allows you to see reviews from all different languages.