Valve comes with new measures against ‘review bombing’ on Steam

Valve is making changes to how reviews are displayed on Steam, which should make it more difficult to manipulate which reviews are shown. According to Valve, bots are trying to place negative reviews at the top.

In a blog post on Steam, Valve explains that it makes two adjustments when displaying written reviews from users. These reviews can be rated as ‘useful’ by others and if many users do, the review will be at the top.

According to Valve, there are users who consider ten thousand reviews per game as useful. Often it is precisely the negative reviews. This is probably done with bots and the intention is to put a game in a negative light. Valve will detect such behavior and exclude it from the calculation that determines whether a review is useful or not.

A second adjustment is that from now on the Store page of a game will highlight a number of negative and positive ‘useful’ reviews that are proportional to the score. If the score is 80 percent, there are eight positive reviews and two negative reviews. As a result, it is no longer possible to only bring up negative reviews by voting for them.

The changes have been made on Steam as beta, but the functionality is enabled by default. In September, Valve already made changes that should make influencing scores on Steam more difficult. In the new blog post, the company says it is considering making even more adjustments.

Review bombing is deliberately lowering a review score by posting a lot of negative reviews in a short period of time and downvoting positive reviews. Some developers have to deal with this because people disagree with a certain point of view. Last summer, the game Firewatch was a victim of this.