Previously, when looking for reviews on a game on Steam you would generally be presented with reviews that were posted either when the game launched, or in other instances when the game was still in its Early Access phase.
Steam wants to improve this process to give you access to reviews that are more relevant and recent. To do this, only reviews that have been posted in the last 30 days will be added.
This will mean no more bad reviews for day one server outages or week one bugs, and give you a clearer picture of what kind of state the game is currently in, not what is was when it launched.
Here are all the details from Steam:
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. 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.
Visibility For Recently Posted 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 As a result, the most helpful reviews presented on a store page would often describe an outdated view of a game that might have changed dramatically over the course of Early Access or post-release development.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.
Recent Review Score
Another problem we identified was that review score that appears at the top of a product page didn’t always reflect the dynamic nature of the game. For that review score, we’d previously only been compiling an overall score using a simple calculation of the percentage of all reviews that were positive. This let us be really transparent in how the score was being calculated, but didn’t accommodate cases when a game has changed a lot (for better or worse) over time. To address that, we’ve now added a Recent review score that calculates the positive percentage of reviews within the past 30 days (as long as there are enough reviews posted within those 30 days and as long as the game has been available on Steam for at least 45 days). The overall score is still present as well in case you still find that information helpful.
Other Review Updates
In addition to the above updates, we’ve made a few other changes:
- The customer review section on a game’s store page has a new “Summary” tab that focuses on recent helpful reviews and recently posted reviews. You can still find overall most help reviews by selecting “Most Helpful” tab.
- There’s a new checkbox when writing a review to more easily disclose if you received the copy of the game for free.
- You can now view all reviews regardless of language by selecting “All Languages” from the language dropdown in the reviews tab of the Community Hub for the game.
