steam is trying to boost every single games store % again

Yeah, I saw that a couple days ago and wondered why no one made a thread about it. Sigh...

This is not new at all, it has worked this way for as far as I can remember. The only thing different is that they added a better description and replaced the key icon with the star.

Nothing new about reviews from people who activated with keys not counting towards the review average displayed on steam.

this is just highlighting what reviews came from keys instead of steam store purchases.

Big deal? They are trying to curb possible fake reviews. How does your review not count? It's still there, it's readable and people can see it. The only top reviews are the ones that are either new or higher voted right? Nothing really changed.

The tooltip is new, but this is how it has worked for many years now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1al5ig5/comment/kpcl16i/

If I remember correctly some shady Devs abused the review system.

As of [Sep 12, 2016], the recent and overall review scores we show at the top of a product page will no longer include reviews written by customers that activated the game through a Steam product key.

https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/24155

This was litterally a thing from like 2016, 2017. It was done to stop scummy devs from abusing the review system with Steam keys they can easily distribute outside of Steam (they are free to generate), thus boosting their score with fake reviews. Also, why did you lose trust in Steam reviews. This simply doesn't allow user score manipulation by the devs. You can still find the reviews from Steam keys (currator connect and gifts as well) on the game's store page. I don't even know if people use "Steam purchase" filter. I know I don't care for it.

i am vengeance, i am the night, i am BATMAN

Just above the actual reviews there is a line saying stuff like: "Showing 835 reviews that match the filters above ( Mostly Positive )", which also shows the %, if you hover the mouse over the descriptive rating (Mostly Positive in this example). This line accounts for all reviews, no matter how the game have been obtained, that match your filters. Also the actual numbers of All, Positive and Negative reviews for all reviews can be seen still a bit higher, when you hover over "Review Type" button.

Which usually doesn't matter that much, because when the numbers are low, they are very often and easily manipulated by legal (just real friends) and illegal (paid for reviews) means, and when they are high, the difference usually isn't big.

Steam does not do enough to ban devs and users for those false reviews, which IMO should be pretty simple, and insists on keeping the number of reviews needed for the rating at a very low level (10), when instead it should be like a 100 at least, which would make rating manipulation significantly harder, more costly and easier to detect. There should just be many times more unrated games, because (what a surprise) they are not rated by enough players.

Easily deleting spam reviews, that are negative, and rarely deleting spam reviews, that are positive, is the 2nd most important thing, that they do to raise the ratio of positive reviews.

Eh, with a few thousand games backlog not like it's essential to buy anything, we'll manage

If the review is in depth people will not care about star or no star and read it still.

If the review is:

Bad game 3/10

Then no one did care and no one will care about such reviews.

It sucks that many of my reviews won't be accounted,
but I also understand it were necessary in order to stop the fake positive reviews.

Don't filter out non Steam purchases. Good to go.
My reviews all show up whether they're purchased on Steam or activated with a Steam key.

Also, if the pool of reviews that count towards the percentages is smaller due to the Steam purchase restriction, then each negative review also carries greater weight and affects the overall score more. ;)

As others have said it is like this for years.

announcement for keys: (September 2016)
https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/24155
announcement that from now on it includes gifts as well: (March 2017)
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/563352991934009789

So the difference is that they changed the wording to be more precise but not how it works.

You can still see the positives vs. negatives from your selected countries including all reviews regardless the source btw.
From my experience the difference is minimal sometimes higher sometimes lower but not by much In the long run the trend is the same.

I actually do have an opinion on this... I have sixty-nine reviews now. A few months ago, just after Steam's last 'inflation-adjusted' price increases recently, the need to go back to some of my reviews came up, to highlight a recurring issue of games being 'good for the price', in light of constant price changes, and even more in light of many prices adjusted to quality vs sales rates and not just inflation adjustments or developer discretion, although a number opted out of the 'recommended retail prices.'

Anyways, after about thrity edits I became hard-locked from editing more reviews, you can go look at my reviews. There is controversy of editing reviews after many people deliver feedback based on original wording. Anyways, I stopped changing more. I think the message came through.

So, to say good 'for the price' throws a different spanner in the works, where my reviews were always based on high value products at good prices, the opposite is true from third party sites usually, with many back catalogue games being cheaper, except for certain titles that are made hard to achieve a good price at on third-market.

In light of all this I do believe its a dutiful compromise for protection for smaller developers and publishers. We all know how easy it is for a game to be mass downvoted in the Wild West of Steam reviews and its cultural fodder for big AAA games flopping for that to happen. But the ease of downvoting means that somewhere in the middle is a pendulum of game not getting as good a rating as they could. We know many bad indie games get the ratings that they deserve as well of course. So, the change in some ways for me aims to address this discrepancy, but will probably not entirely have the desired effect... The consumers dont mind but there's a reason other launchers dont feature user reviews.

But yes, I cant write a glowing review for a $2 game and then have it distorted by a 1000% price increase. That's about it....

Two other noteworthy changes recently that came up due to my offline gaming habits:

• Hours played accumulate while gaming offline, but the extra hours are only visible in profile library inspection. If you compare it to hours where you see how many hours your friends have played a game, that will count only online hours. And also, only 'certain' games (most). You lose the advantage of not clocking hours steathily on a game if you wish to, but get credit for hours as well which you previously didnt. This library management process is also influenced probably by 'privating' a game, but I still dont have that option.

• If you launch a game offline, your profile does not show you launched the game when you come back online, unless (change) its the first time you ever launched the game, the it will show launched with 0.0 hours. I think the over-arching gripe with this is me annoying people with me just wanting to try a game without sending 300 notifications out to my social circle, for various reasons, sometimes.

Were Steam reviews ever worth anything?
I consider Steam reviews at the same level I consider IMDB reviews. Some are fanboy/girl-ing, some are trolling, some are just personal opinions and most are irrelevant to whether I will like a game or not.

This being said, I think this will probably lower the game ratings and not increase it.
When you see how many recent games got tons of shit reviews by people who actually buy games just to take a dump on it (because they don't like the studio, because they didn't get what they wanted from the game or because their hopes for this feature or that feature were squashed), and then get refunds... Steam buyers only reviews won't give them better ratings, far from it.

16 year steam club here and I was not aware of this also.

I would be very pissed if I got hundreds of reviews as putting so many hours and no impact on the score should not really feel good

I would have preferred a filter based on playing time rather than how the game was obtained. Indeed, how many comments are made after less than 3 hours of play while HLTB announces 10x more. How can these evaluations be more reliable than those of a player who spent dozens of hours on a game but purchased it from an approved store? It's as if we were giving our opinion after having just read the 10 first pages to a 200-page book, or after having seen 10 minutes of a 2-hour film

The "All Reviews" section above the dev and publisher have been like that for a long time, at the very least since 2017. When I was running my GA group that started in 2017 for very positive games this is what we went off to prevent dev manipulation of reviews through keys.

Thanks looks like i already own all the game.

More like they changed the appearance to get more clicks. My brain urges me to click on these star outlines to fill them up.

This has been a thing since the inception of Steam reviews. They're just more open about it. Mainly to just curb review boosting ironically since the only way Steam can verify that you spent money on the game (instead of getting it for free) is by seeing their own records of purchases.