Steam has a problem. Well, okay, Steam has many problems- but one of those problems is the trend of users taking to the store page of a game they do not like, and bombing it with a negative review, something that tends to happen en masse often thanks to the bandwagon mentality many on the internet share.
Valve has already tried to introduce fixes to this problem by adding a review histogram for each game- which basically lets you chart review trends for a game, and see if there was ever a sudden influx of mysterious reviews (and therefore attribute a negative rating for a game to review bombing); but now, Valve is introducing more active and far reaching changes to how it deals with user reviews.
As outlined a Steam blog post, Valve will now take action against users manipulating review recommendations (every Steam user review can be rated as ‘Helpful’ and ‘Unhelpful’, which has led to many to spam ‘Helpful’ ratings for negative reviews, causing them to rise to the top, while giving positive reviews ‘Unhelpful’ ratings), and store pages will now show a proportionate amount of positive and negative reviews for a game- so if 80% of a game’s reviews are positive, then 8/10 reviews shown on the page will be positive ones.
It remains to be seen whether this addresses the issues Steam user reviews have- but it is at least heartening to see Valve attempt to do something about the issue.
