Steam has changed its review system again

There was a little outrage last week when Valve changed how customer reviews show and affect the overall rating of a game on Steam. The algorithm was tweaked so that only copies of the game bought of Steam affected the score – meaning that keys acquired from other stores or directly from the developer, say through Kickstarter, did nothing to affect it.

While the review was still able to be seen if you opted-in to seeing “All Reviews” and not just from people who had bought it through Steam the change meant that other copies and reviews had no effect on the important “Overall Score” on Steam. The backlash has caused (in a rather rare event) Valve to respond and attempt to address the criticism.

The customer review policy has once again been updated so that reviews of a game activated by a key are now shown by default but still do not affect the Overall Score. While this does not fix the problem many small indie developers had with the change it does mean these reviews are now more easily seen.

Another small change implemented is that if a game has an Overall Score of “Mixed” it now shows in yellow instead of the old red display. Valve have also stated that at some point in the future there will be an opt-in beta that attempts to hide joke reviews better.

While Steam’s review process is still a thing of much controversy it doesn’t look like Valve will be going back on the bigger, previous change. However the change of display colour for mixed reviews and the possibility of getting rid of joke reviews is an overall positive one.