Steam user reviews are often trusted by a good portion of PC players on the actual state of a game. As they can arrive and change the perception of a game at any point in its lifecycle, they are often a zeitgeist of a moment in a game’s history.
However, often when you sift through reviews, you’re throwing out ones that are one-line jokes or drawings using ascii art. To combat this, Valve has outlined a new helpfulness system in a blog post.
In short, it’ll look at “reviews that are identified as being unhelpful for potential customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ascii art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes.” These reviews “will be sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page. That doesn’t mean players won’t ever see these humorous, but unhelpful posts, but it hopefully means that they’ll see them less frequently when trying to learn about a game.”
We’re not sure how this will affect review-bombing reviews, as while often these are done in bad faith with toxicity at the forefront of the message, we have seen review bombs work in the past for a better cause, such as when Helldivers II sought to block itself from those without access to the PlayStation Network.
It’ll be interesting to see what constitutes as a helpful review, but if you’re really not a fan of this idea, you can turn it off.