author: Michael Kulakowski
Steam Promises to Eliminate Review Bombing
Valve announced that it will battle the occasional waves of negative reviews on Steam, so-called review bombing, issued for reasons completely unrelated to the game and aimed only at lowering the score of a specific title.
Recently, we have often heard about the cases of review bombing on Steam. The fans often use this method to express their dissatisfaction with the anti-consumer actions of specific publishers and developers who use different forms of DRM, for example, or attack the political views they hold, as in the recent case of the Taiwanese horror Devotion criticized by Chinese players. Steam has just announced that it intends to put a halt to such practices.
In an official blog entry by Steam, the store presented a plan to stop the flood of review bombing. First of all, Valve intends to analyze player reviews in terms of content, ignoring those that are not directly related to the title and are designed to lower a game's score in the store. The frequency of appearance of reviews will also be monitored. After consultation with the developer, negative ratings published in the short term will be, for example, largly ignored.
However, more strict monitoring also has its disadvantages. Valve confirms, for example, that it does not intend to take into account negative ratings due to the use of DRM systems such as Denuvo. According to the service, the average consumer does not care about such issues, so it is logical that the assessment he or she sees does not reflect the controversies associated with them.
It is worth noting that no reviews will be removed. We will still be able to find them and read them in order to form our own opinion. What's more, if we want to continue to see an overall game rating that takes into account all the reviews ignored by the system, we can use the new Steam Preferences option. Soon we should see how the new policy will work in action.
