“unhelpful” review aka reviews that could make them earn less money.
What? You think they should run the platform out of the kindness of their hearts?
Why not? Don’t people play games because they want to have fun?
The instance and platform you are using to comment isn’t a corporation grinding billions.
Please just give us a “maybe”
This is a good change, they have had the unhelpful/helpful/funny review system for years now, but I always found it weird it didn’t do anything aside from boost on “helpful” rating. something that is majority unhelpful rated shouldn’t be shown on the review page or arguably in the score in the first place.
Good. I’m sick of seeing the “pet this cat” reviews at the top of the list. Hopefully this changes some of that stuff.
5,000 Steam awards on the “review” too.
Fucking finally. I love a funny joke but if you’re looking for serious reviews, you currently have to wade through a sea of trolls, jokes and copy-pasted meme reviews in order to figure out if a game is interesting to you.
Community features are cool but if you’re the most popular platform of your kind, you’re gonna attract a lot of trolls who’s content can be really out there. Filters are a good solution to this!
This is what I hope it is. There’s way too many joke reviews. I don’t want to see review bombs get silenced because they are very informative when I’m not in the know about a particular developer/game’s situation. I don’t want to buy games that are outraging players. Chances are, I’ll be one of the outraged too if I give them my money.
Better than sex
- the most genius comedian of all time
Nobody will read this so I’ll just say it: I’m gay.
A lot of them aren’t even about the game at all…
It’s because sometimes I just want to “rate” the game, not “review” it but steam won’t let me. So sometimes I just write “it sucks.” or sometimes some random shit. Steam should have a idk 5 star rating system with optional reviews. Makes more sense but shit games will be bought less I bet.
There’s this very nice template you can use to quickly make a more detailed review without having to write it all yourself. You can always just google “Steam review template” to find it.
I know, but these suck
Just let me rate 1-5 and leave a wall of text if I want to
That template is part of the problem
Why do you think so? I feel like they’re some of the most useful reviews I come across.
Cherry picking here but what use is this category when it lists the required size right on the store page?
It just makes it impossible to provide any nuance related to the elements of a review. It’s not just important to say “audio is very good”, but also what makes this audio very good. Everyone has a different idea of what good and bad means, rendering a bunch of biased multiple choice questions mostly useless for readers
And people explaining what the game is instead of how the game is.
A review should tell you what the game is. It should also tell you what they like/don’t like about it, but different perspectives about how the core mechanics work are absolutely critical parts of the discussion.
Indeed, sometimes I really appreciate a heads up of if I can save in the middle of gameplay or if I have to complete a whole run before it saves progress, things like that are not deal breakers but it can definitely affect how I play a game
There’s stuff like that, but it’s also as simple as most game pages just not accurately depicting what the core gameplay loop is. The number of games with 10 cinematic trailers that combine for 3 seconds of gameplay and have descriptions full of setting with maybe some features but don’t mention whether they’re a card game or an FPS is way too high.
Screenshots can probably resolve my example, and tags are “OK”, but marketing trash is just so abundant that a lot of pages are genuinely hard to figure out pretty basic elements of what the minute to minute experience is.
God I hate cinematic trailers for unreleased games. It’s fine if it’s a released game that I can just Google gameplay.
I straight up am not interested in them at all.
There are some games where I become attached to the writing, even though most are pretty mediocre and it’s not why I play games. But I’ve never once had a story trailer interest me in any way. I will play the game if the mechanics are compelling, regardless of story. If they aren’t, the story isn’t better than a book or TV show and I don’t care.
It’s super annoying when even the screenshots are cinematic nonsense. It’s a game. I want to know what the game is.
different perspectives about how the core mechanics work
As you said, how they work. The description already tells me what the game is and I don’t need a review reciting it a la “Shadow warrior is an action adventure fps game where you play as a ninja fighting against demons”
Descriptions are useless horseshit.
A review that doesn’t mention what the actual gameplay loop is is a bad review.
To further flesh out your comment:
I recently played a small game called “Ever Forward” on the Nintendo switch. Nowhere it says that the game runs like a PowerPoint presentation. Other than that, it would be helpful if I would have read a review that said “the beautiful world you see in the trailer and screenshots is the ‘hub’ where you enter boring looking levels. The puzzles consist of 2-3 cameras that react to sound and a cube you can throw and that you need to carry to the end of each short puzzle.”
This is a side effect of YouTube content creation practices where a video will have an overview of the plot or story to pad out the run time or article. Often, because game journalism is basically long distance abusive relationships between the writer and the game publisher, the review is too mild to contain actual opinions and will draw on comparisons to other games instead of forming genuine critiques and admiration.
The end result is a generation of games and movies where the review is unable to provide enough genuine content to fill 10 minutes or 3 pages, so they instead spoil the game while riffing on very specific foibles. They don’t know how to talk critically about mechanics or story or design.
Sometimes the game itself doesn’t really tell you what it is. That’s not completely shocking.
Really good change. Filtering out “funny” reviews are what everyone’s thinking of, but I hope this also gets rid of those dumb reviews where people just fill out a long form rating everything 10/10 just because they like the game.
How I feel about your comment: 1 - it’s ugly 2 - meh 3 - the graphics are okay 4 - it’s pretty 5 - OMG it’s like real life!
5/5
Never going to review on Steam again.
I’ve put some big effort into a select few reviews a few years ago and some cunt copied and pasted them entirely to repost them on the same game.
I reported it multiple times but no action was taken, so yeah.
Reviews being a message board for grievances and memes really sucks. It reflects badly on gamers. Makes everything look trashy.
Memes? yes!
Grievances? That’s exactly what a review is for! Telling other people what you do and don’t like about a thing.
I wish they would also let us filter out unuseful guides.
PROS
- I can write a list
- It will be a few lines
- I can fluff it up a bit
- Keep going
- Almost there
- It’s an okay game
CONS
- I’ll write 200 of these
- Most will be nitpicky
- I still played over 1000 hours
- I clearly have never written a line of code yet somehow know how they could have done it better
- I should be paid as a game journalist
3/10
at least these reviews are more informative about a game than the “just leaving this cat here” for thr billionth time
I do enjoy a sprinkling of meme and unhinged reviews - especially as part of Northernlion Reads Hentai Game Steam Reviews segments - but overall this is probably a change for the better.
Are ya winning, son?
Should probably just filter them out by default, and then have a sort by funny or something.
Who will review the reviewer?
I wonder how many real reviews are going to get filtered as “unhelpful” because the developer or other people don’t like what the review says, even if what is said is factually true.
Or fanboys going through all reviews and downvoting any negative reactions. I’m willing to bet folding money that Hollow Knight’s user score is going to go up because of this because their fanbase is toxic af
One problem steam doesn’t have is with fake accounts. They can be reasonably sure which accounts are legit and ignore votes from the more questionable ones
Speaking of unhelpful, eurogamer.net is littered with ads. They add no value to the original Reddit post (https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1emb4ch/valve_is_finally_addressing_bad_reviews_issue/).
