Steam review system - good or bad?

Terrible. The thumbs down button is useless, the funny button is stupid, and it's like they're trying to wrap everyone in bubblewrap, so that nobody's feelings get hurt, especially now that you can disable comments on reviews.

I write, sometimes, previews. A part in english and a part in german. I prefer in the last months german because i don't see very often reviews in german and sometimes i don't want use my brain for translation and would be happy over more previews in german :o).

[Bad english because it is 1 AM here and i come from a birthday party... the drinks got better and better with each glass :-D]

A up/down system is useless for deciding how good a game is. I'd much rather have a 5 star, 1-10 or percent system that you could give scores. That way you could separate the good games from the great games. Or more important, the slightly bad vs the terrible/asset flip games.

I almost exclusively read reviews from friends with similar taste in games, but when I do read the other Steam reviews, it's always the negative reviews. They typically contain more useful information, in my opinion, and if I still want a game after reading the negatives, I know it's a game I really want.

So I guess my TLDR answer would be "needs to be improved."

The thing is just a few people leaves reviews for the games they own, and the curators are pretty much unknown from most of Steam users & the few who leaves some reviews didn't judge really the game for what the game is, like the ones who leaves just 1 word or something like "the game is too hard" or "I can't launch the game, this is shit" with an Intel Pentium PC & a lot of insults ... In overall the reviews seems pretty accurate, good game have high scores and bad ones a big red text but maybe they can add other options ?

IMO the core issue with the review system is that you can only rate 100 or 0. Not many games are truly 0, and even less many games are truly 100.
Steam forces us into this fake dichotomy, and it not only breaks the global rating, but also incentivize people to defend a point of view more clear-cut than they might really want to, and discourages neutral reviews (doesn't deserve a thumb up, but doesn't deserve a thumb down either = move on to sth else).

User reviews are inherently flawed since they aren't an indicator of whether a game is good or not, they're indicators that people got what they expected. This is why weeb VNs are some of the highest rated games, because most people already know if they'll enjoy it or not the moment they see it.

I'd love if user reviews could be more in-depth with points and such, but every user has their own heuristic so there'd still be problems. Mostly I just want a better system for identifying and notifying people of hardware incompatibilities.

most things can always be improved, but considering it's a gaming platform with people from all ages and cultures i think it's not so bad. you just need to filter a lot of useless and probably biased reviews and read the ones that appear honest (both neg. and positive ones).

anyway, if i really want something i don't even bother with reviews, there are better ways to find out of you like something, like gameplay videos.

• no grading between Recommended or not is a dumbass limitation when writing reviews.
• only counting reviews from people who purchased from the steam store in key is a dumbass way to warp statistics, and keeps many legit reviews from view.
• the "funny" button serves no real purpose and as such is just another dumbass idea.
• there's no way to directly report a review for being obviously fake, or completely off-topic. Which is a dumbass limitation when you're reading reviews.
• disabling comments on reviews by default is whatever. In my experience reviews don't draw many comments anyway so that doesn't make a big difference

So, the review system is mostly dumbass.

There absolutely should be a 1-10 points system. Naturally some (simple minded) people would still vote everything with either 1 or 10 points then, but not a majority. There are several sites, such as IMDb, which prove that such a system can provide reliable and meaningful information.

Damn, I could imagine so many interesting statistics they could provide.
"Show me the highest rated games with the tag y for gamers older than 30, with 1k+ hours in grand strategy games".

Instead we get thumbs up or down and they wreck the few valuable data miners, such as Steam Spy ... hooray!

View attached image.

Needs to beimproved at least in one point: to allow neutral reviews. Like mentioned above - so far we got dichotomy: good or bad, but some games are average (more or less). Those are nor totally bad nor epic titles also - good to play for 10 minutes or any spare time you got now. I couldn't make a negative reviwe about them, but sometimes I don't feel like giving those positive either. Middle option would be nice.

Ist doch eh alles fake. Brauchst dir da doch nur die ganzen Reviews anzuschauen von Leute die ihre Keys kostenlos erhalten haben. Diese Reviews haben alle eines gemeinsam, die wurden positiv bewertet. Die Reviews lese ich mir schon seit Jahren nicht mehr durch, besser ich mache mir selbst ein Bild mit der Demo (wird natürlich immer mehr eine Rarität) oder einem Test Video auf youtube.

Mit der Abschaffung des Downvote Buttons hat Valve ebenfalls den Sinn der Reviews mitabgeschafft.

Definitely needs to be improved, an example I could find:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/495890/Montaro/, a meme game that got Overwhelmingly Positive ratings
https://store.steampowered.com/app/65980/Sid_Meiers_Civilization_Beyond_Earth/, a good serious strategy game that got mixed scores..

Every time I read some reviews of a game in my native language, I see the same "This is a good game because I liked it" and "This is a bad game because I didn't like it" (usually it is said with different words, but it is the same meaning) or stupid jokes.

The problem is not the system, the problem are the users who write useless reviews.

I think it should be possible for users to give their thumbs up / down vote without the need to write something. This way they could rate how they like, we get less of these useless one sentence reviews and it would be easier to find some good reviews.

Better than it was, still needs a lot of work.

I keep wondering if my down votes of useless reviews and up votes of useful reviews just mean Steam shows me more useless random reviews at the top as my "reward" for being a helpful review feedback voter instead of showing me the reviews that are actually widely voted as being useful.

(Right now, my settings are set such that I see reviews from three different languages. One of those in particular is more frequently useless than the others.)

The binary system is terrible. Most sites use the 5-star (or even 10-star with allowing to give half-stars) system or just text in general. The reliability of the Steam score is shaky at best, although it can show clear trends.

I don't think the review system can be fixed in any way. There are tons of trolls on steam who go through reviews and post nonsense on purpose and they troll reviews by spamming the funny button on them.

Not to mention all those reviews which are marked as "product received for free" and activated by key and not bought from steam directly. 99.99% of them are fake no matter what the game is. Publishers give keys for free to people that get lots of attention and these people post positive reviews always even though the games are garbage so they can get more free keys in the future for other games. And they suck in gullible people to buy their garbage games thinking they are not bad.

I don't think Valve can do anything about it. There will ALWAYS be people who try to abuse the system for their own profit.

Personally I always write exactly what I think about a game on my reviews. Even if I get free key for a game at some point in the future I will still write a bad review for it if it is bad.

Sure it's nice when people spent their time and efford to write proffessional-ish reviews but I never considered this system as ment to publish reviews. It it more like place were people can voised their general impression about game. And few sentences is enough, I think. Just mention graphics, story, gameplay and bugs and will consider such "review" helpfull.

The general idea isn't bad, but people misuse it - there is no set quality in reviews, some people just want their voice to be heard while they have nothing to say with reviews like " it was okay I guess". The binary system to show how useful a review is is just plain bullshit, vengeance- and disagreement-downvotes all around Steam, and now with hiding the amount of downvotes AND the ability to turn off commenting on reviews, nothing can stop a completely wrong review to be top if enough people (like fans, followers) vote on it, with no indication that it's not even true.
The most useful way I can use the reviews is to connect ~ 10% jumps to expressions, and that's still only about the general quality of the game, one needs to read after what the game is and how it works. Like 90%+ is generally a great game. 80-95% means it's good, but there are some disagreements about it, enough to worth look into what people find problems. 70%ish is similar, more likely unoriginal or couldn't flash out the general ideas, so it's a bit lacking. 60%ish can have great ideas but if a game is this low in mass reviews, it's guaranteed to have pretty serious and widespread problems that one needs to know if they can tolerate.
The way reviews work, and people think that their review is enough to be a "it's fine" or "it's shit, and also I didn't read what the game is but it's different what I thought it is" is fucking up the objective usefulness of them. It would be better to have proper reviewers with information in their reviews, but problem is that I guess Steam intended curators to be that (and doesn't work) and that the way store pages work, one needs to open a longer review in full page to be well readable, otherwise it's a very narrow, very long, hard to read mess.

Steam needs:

• 10/10 rating system
• more simple and fair reviews arrangement system
• return of dislikes for reviews
• ban of one-liner reviews

I second the idea so many others have for a ?/10 scoring system.

Or at the very least, a "neutral /neither recommend or not recommend" option.

It's okay, but you can only vote if you like or if you dislike a game.
But what if you like the game, but it actually costs to much ?
What if you are not sure ?
What if the game is just okay ?

I like some ideas over here.
10 points rating system would be great, also deleting the short reviews, wich are spamm.
They need also to improve the comments under the reviews, because my comments are always to long.
I know. It is not Facebook, but sometimes I feel like the game is worth to be talked about.

So yes.... In my opinion it's okay, but it needs to be improved.
A new rating system with points or something like that would be great.
Because sometimes I am playing games wich I just don't like, but they are wll made, so I have to give a no, but I would love to give a 6/10 or a 7/10.
You can still translate the points to %. So every kid will understand it.

It needs to be improved. It should have been a multiple starsystem. Were people can choose/create certain keywords to judge the game, something like:

-For each keyword you can tell something about it.
-If you select a certain keyword, you can find everything what all the people have said.
-Maybe also add some tags to your review, like Assetflipper
-Maybe also, reviews should only count if you played it for more than 1hour. Only problem is, that there are some legit games that are shorter than that.

Story 4/5
Gameplay 3/5
Character development 4/5
Artstyle graphics 5/5
Multiplayer 4/5
Developer reputation 3/5

This way a developer might be able to see why a game is good/bad and where to improve.
Some other stores already have a multiple starsystem, like google play, but only for a few keywords.