this thread arose from my celebratory lvl 10 rant with stat dump available here, if you want to backtrack how my twisted mind works, go right ahead!

what always struck me as unusual is the discrepancy between the numbers in All Reviews rating on a Steam page of a game and in SteamDB rating on SteamDB page of the same game. i am talking about both the actual rating Percentage, as well as the number of User Reviews.

i mean, not that i know or understand the background of how those reviews are actually calculated, but if the fields are indeed providing the information they are advertising, heck, then they should be quite the same, those two, ammirite?

long ago i started trusting more the value SteamDB offers, but i thought it might as well be a good time to ask whether anybody understands why this difference. as Steam itself always has a lower user review numbers, does that mean they are hiding something? i guess they might be tinkering the results a bit, and Steam also has Recent Reviews thing, but, well, that still does not fully justify all this to me.

its not only that numbers differ, what also annoys me are games that are marked as No user reviews on Steam, yet they have a pretty conclusive numbers on SteamDB. is Steam not really rushing to display the values before some threshold is reached, or what. i am too lazy to find an example of this, but i guess anybody might have encountered this before.

other good example of total misalignment are games that show relatively favorable review percentage on Steam, only that the actual number on SteamDB is way lower. these might not be the best examples of this, but they are the ones i manage to run into recently:

  • BANZAI PECAN: The Last Hope For the Young Century has Positive All Reviews here on Steam, with 84% of the 19 user reviews, yet the same game has a measly 45.51% of the 91 user reviews here on SteamDB.
  • maybe a better example, 1993 Space Machine has Very Positive All Reviews here on Steam, with 83% of the 53 user reviews, and the same game has a much lower 65.21% of the 262 user reviews here on SteamDB.

i dont know, i have no idea who is behind SteamDB and i dont care much, but i doubt their numbers are made up. every time i wanna properly weigh in the rating of a game, i know i go to SteamDB, be it to see the rating not even shown on Steam or just to see if a good rating there is really accurate.

maybe someone here can shed some light on how all this works, and why bad ol' Steam is obfuscating some of those numbers.

whatever might be the deal, one tip i can share, SteamDB browser extension is a great little thing that makes my life easier, maybe give it a spin.

now, if you got this far, its only fair you get some treat, try this one on for size! and look for more in originating thread, wink!

2 years ago

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The reason of the discrepancy is that the number on Steam is only the people that bought in on Steam directly.

What I always do is check (under similar products) the reviews. I don't read all the reviews, but I check EXACTLY how many positives and negatives.

So, while checking "BANZAI PECAN: The Last Hope For the Young Century" on the steam page, I see it has 19 reviews, 84% positive... whatever, don't care. I then go in the same page a little lower, and I see a total of 91 reviews, 40 positive, 51 negative. This is the more important.

2 years ago
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IIRC SteamDB also uses a calculation that pushes anything with a small number of votes towards an average rating, which avoids the problem where if you sort by review the top games are all ones that have 100% of four people or the like.

2 years ago
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now, look at that, ha! yep, now it matches... well, in all my attention to detail, i have totally missed out on this one... you live, you learn, thanks for the answer, be good, quijote3000!

2 years ago
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AFAIK the first number of reviews - in this case, 19 - are the reviews in your preferred languages you set in your Steam preferences. In my case, I also see 19 reviews and I have set my languages to German and English.

The second number of reviews - in this case, 91 - are all the reviews that exist on Steam, thus all reviews in all languages, even if you did not tick their checkboxes in Steam settings.

2 years ago
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Yeah as quijote3000 said it's because Steam Store doesn't count reviews from people who activated keys in its aggregate percentages. This is a policy from the days of mass key giveaways in the days of Steam Greenlight when users were often encouraged to review in exchange for game keys.

2 years ago
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Yup, lots of devs were giving out keys for fake reviews.

2 years ago
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well, ha, okay, that expands even more on quijote3000s answer, and, yeah, get me one step closer in understanding what we have right now! thanks for this, HowCanSheSlap, all the best!

2 years ago
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Thank you bitterman for the question (as well as your other questions. Inquiring minds do like to know such things! And thank you even more quijote for changing this from a question into knowledge! :)

I had realized that something was off, when I'd seen, for example "Mostly positive" and then went to see the reviews and half or more were negative. I hadn't realized that the number above was just for actual Steam purchases and had not noticed the full count below.

Which brings me to one of my pet peeves... having to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll to see the reviews and then scroll, scroll, scroll to return to the top to, for example search for a different game. Why no give us hyperlink to jump to reviews and to return to top? Or why not leave a little bar active like barter does allow on to search without having to do the scroll?

2 years ago*
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haha, exactly! i tend to be an inquisitive mind, and i just dumped all the questions i ever wanted to know here at once. on this one in particular, yup, quijote3000 turned it into knowledge, mhm!

and, hei, and you do bring up an interesting point, i do the same exhausting up and down scroll, when there should be an easy way around it. well, i guess it might be a good topic to bring up somewhere, wink, Dominicanoed just maybe do it in a less annoying way than i did, heh...!

2 years ago
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Aw, you bring a bit of brash and swagger to your topics. Nothing wrong with that. :)

2 years ago
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Why guessing when you can know for sure?
https://steamdb.info/blog/steamdb-rating/

2 years ago
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well, lookie here, didnt know didnt check, khm... it was documented! well, thats clears up all my ambiguities. thanks for this, Ryzhehvost!

2 years ago
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Closed 2 years ago by bitterman4020.