Valve will be making changes to its reviews system on Steam to prevent dishonest reviews and “deceptive tactics to generate a more positive review score” from developers. Essentially, Steam will not factor in reviews by those who activated a game through a product key. They can still be viewed but their score will no longer contribute to the overall average.
The developer noted in a statement that “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, of course, legitimate reasons why this could be true for a game: Some games have strong audiences off Steam, and some games have passionate early adopters or Kickstarter backers that are much more invested in the game.”
However, that may not always be true. “But in many cases, the abuse is clear and obvious, such as duplicated and/or generated reviews in large batches, or reviews from accounts linked to the developer. In those cases, we’ve now taken action by banning the false reviews and will be ending business relationships with developers that continue violating our rules.”
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