Valve is executing a number of updates to the customer review system on Steam. The updates, explained on a post on the Steam store, affect any reviews written by users who activate the game using a Steam key.
Users who purchase a game via the Steam storefront are able to write a review and enter a sore for the game. After the update, users who activate a game via a Steam key will still be able to write a review but not be able to assign a score to the game. Valve explains that this is being done after finding that some developers have abused the system by inflating review scores. Valve has found evidence of “duplicated and/or generated reviews in large batches” for some games.
“The majority of review score manipulation we’re seeing by developers is through the process of giving out Steam keys to their game, which are then used to generate positive reviews,” Valve states in its post. “Some developers organize their own system using Steam keys on alternate accounts. Some organizations even offer paid services to write positive reviews.”
Valve is not restricting developers from giving out Steam keys or selling them in other stores. The restriction for users activating via Steam keys comes after some analysis by Valve. According to them, “an analysis of games across Steam shows that at least 160 titles have a substantially greater percentage of positive reviews by users that activated the product with a CD key, compared to customers that purchased the game directly on Steam.”
There are legitimate reasons why some of these numbers are inflated, including Kickstarter titles and strong external fan bases. Valve acknowledges this, but also notes that the abuse they have noted is “clear and obvious.” As a result, Valve intends to end its business relationships with developers who have violated the rules.
Valve has outlined their next steps in addressing other issues within Steam:
- There are some titles where the most helpful reviews don’t seem to accurately match the general customer sentiment. For example, there are a couple of prominent titles that have review scores of ‘positive’ but all the reviews marked as helpful are negative. We need to look at this to figure out how to represent cases where the community has highly divergent opinions.
- There are some titles where a small group of users are able to consistently mark specific reviews as helpful, and as a result can present a skewed perception of what customers are saying about the game. This is obviously not ideal, so we’re looking at ways to ensure that a few users don’t have outsized influence over the system.
- Some off-topic reviews get marked as ‘helpful’ simply because they are funny. These don’t appear to actually be helpful in determining whether you should buy the game, so we’re working on some ways to better detect and filter out these.
