Valve has revealed that a new feature has been implemented on Steam to combat the recent trend of review-bombing games.
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Review-bombing is a pretty straightforward concept that many Steam users have quickly caught onto: If a developer does something that you disagree with, even if it’s not related to their products in any way, target their games with waves of negative reviews. This causes the games’ review scores to plummet, and though it’s a quick one-way line of communication for players to release their frustration, it severely bogs down the reviews and lessens their quality.
The whole point of reviews is so that prospective buyers can contemplate a purchase by reading the opinions of fellow gamers, but you can’t do that if you can’t trust the reviews. Valve recognized this, especially following the PewDiePie incident where users targeted Firewatch after the dev spoke out against the famous YouTuber. The company said that games occasionally return to a healthy pre-review bomb state after the wave of bad reviews runs its course, but the review bombs sometimes do negatively affect games even after controversy dies down.
To fix this issue, Valve looked at a couple of different options. They considered removing the review score entirely to make players read the actual review instead of just looking at a score, but it was ultimately decided that doing so wasn’t a viable option. Another option was locking reviews on specific games if abnormal activity was detected, but even after the lock period ended, they speculated that the game’s score would still drop.
Ultimately, they decided to change the way that players see what a game’s reviews look like instead of changing the way that a game is reviewed.
“Starting today, each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game, and by clicking on any part of the histogram you’re able to read a sample of the reviews from that time period,” an update from Valve read. “As a potential purchaser, it’s easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it’s something you care about.”
The graphs should be implemented for each Steam game now, so take a good look at them before investing in a new game to see if a bad review is honest or if it’s just another review bomb.
