How come SteamDB rating is not more relevant?

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!