Valve has announced that is planning to change the criteria of how the Steam handles customer reviews on its platform. Valve plans to identify and remove all ‘off-topic review bombs’ that might have affected the user review scores of different games.
Opening customer reviews on digital stores is always a bargain for both the product and the platform. A product cannot satisfy ever consumer out there however it becomes a major problem when customers start review-bombing a product just because they do not like one decision by the developer or the platform.
In the past few months, we have seen different examples of customers review bombing a certain title just because the customers were unhappy with their decision or any other off-topic element in the mix. The latest title to come under review-bombing fire was Metro Exodus and in this case, Metro Exodus was not even review bombed.
Just because Deep Silver made Metro Exodus an Epic Games Store exclusive for one year, fans went to Steam and started review bombing the previous Metro titles in the franchise which is highly damaging for the reputation of a product and the developer. Both titles had very good reviews but after the review bombing both of them had mostly negative reviews.
Despite being excellent titles, just because the fans did not like Metro Exodus being on Epic Games Store they ended up being the victim of review bombing. However now Valve is gearing up to counter situations like this and give developers more security when it comes to their reviews.
Metro Exodus is not the only example in this scenario. Titles such such PUGB, Dota 2, Devotion and many others have been the victim of negative review bombing just because of different political or ideological disagreements. This hurts the developers in ways that a common consumer cannot understand.
However, Valve has set out to fix this terrible practice and has announced in an official post that they are going to remove all off-topic reviews from games. Their official statement states
We define an off-topic review bomb as one where the focus of those reviews is on a topic that we consider unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game, and hence not something that should be added to the Review Score.
Obviously, there’s a grey area here, because there’s a wide range of things that players care about. So how will we identify these off-topic review bombs? The first step is a tool we’ve built that identifies any anomalous review activity on all games on Steam in as close to real-time as possible. It doesn’t know why a given game is receiving anomalous review activity, and it doesn’t even try to figure that out. Instead, it notifies a team of people at Valve, who’ll then go and investigate. We’ve already run our tool across the entire history of reviews on Steam, identifying many reasons why games have seen periods of anomalous review activity, and off-topic review bombs appear to only be a small number of them.
If you still confused about how it will work, Valve also issued a simpler statement of what is going to happen after the new tool is in place.
That change can be described easily: we’re going to identify off-topic review bombs, and remove them from the Review Score.
You can check out more details on this upcoming change on the official post on Steam.
What are your thoughts on Valve’s new decision? Do you agree with Valve and how it is planning to remove negative reviews in the future or do you prefer the old review system?
