Steam user review system tweaked

Valve has altered the way user reviews are accessed on Steam to separate newer and older entries.

Games will now carry two separate review listings labelled ‘Recent’ (sourced from the previous 30 days) and ‘Overall’. The thinking is that as games are updated, older reviews may cease to be as relevant. More recent reviews, therefore, could be argued to offer a more pertinent assessment.

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,” Valve said.

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.

While there are plenty of new reviews posted every day, we saw that it was often difficult for newer reviews to be seen and voted on enough to become listed as most helpful. As a result, the most helpful reviews presented on a store page would often describe an outdated view of a game that might have changed dramatically over the course of Early Access or post-release development.

By listing recently posted reviews more prominently and by defaulting to recent helpful reviews, Steam can now show a more current idea of what it’s like to play the game now.”