It seems like the previous incident with Firewatch and Pewdiepie has caught the attention of Valve. Through a blog post the company underlines a few changes that are going to be done to user reviews. These changes are meant to stop the effectivity of what’s known as “Review bombing”, regardless of circumstance.

Why is this a big problem according to Steam? According to the blog post, “one thing we’ve noticed is that the issue players are concerned about can often be outside the game itself.” The problem comes by the fact that the reviews are meant to the product in general. And according to Steam developers, things such as something the developer has said online. Choices the developer has made in the Steam version of their game relative to other platforms. Or simple distaste towards their political conviction/stance aren’t relevant.

Remember when I completely skipped the DRM issue with Sonic Mania and proceeded to review the game as is? It wasn’t until the DRM was cracked that I talked about the issue because I believed that a DRM issue shouldn’t hold back what’s an otherwise good game. That’s the approach Steam is taking towards the issue of Review bombing.

“When it comes to the Review Score itself, however, it’s even less clear that these out-of-game reasons are relevant. When we look at what happens with the Review Score after a review bomb, we see that it generally recovers, in some cases fully back to where it was beforehand.” Then, the blog adds the following. “This implies that, while the review bombers were unhappy with a decision the developer made, the purchasers of the product afterwards were often as happy with the game as the players before them.”

This was something I wanted to talk about in a scrapped Op-ed regarding Pewdiepie and his fanbase. Because it seems like they thought that review bombing Firewatch’s Steam page would lower sales or something. While it did nothing but change the review score average from “Mostly positive” to “Mixed”.

Valve looked at many ways to solve the issue. One of them being locking off people from reviewing for a period of time. But this isn’t a solution they’d want to take. “We didn’t like the way this ultimately meant restricting the ability for players to voice their opinions. We don’t want to stop the community having a discussion about the issue they’re unhappy about, even though there are probably better places to have that conversation than in Steam User Reviews.”

So, the solution now is to implement graphs that are going to reflect how much the Steam reviews have changed over time. Each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game. This solution aims to make customers decide whether or not the reasoning for a review bombing of a game is their concern or not.

This doesn’t really fix much except giving the potential buyer a choice of whether or not they find reviews relevant. Which really is something a lot of people do by default (I know I do). Since User Reviews are really depending on the “Mood of the audience”, it’s not that hard to find that the review system isn’t really accurate to determine if a game is really good or not.

I’m sure there are better ways to address these issues. Ones that keep the discussion afloat without relying on a score given by the community. But the best we can do is wait and see what happens.