Steam Reviews Do Not Count Gifts or Free Games
Posted By: GamerDating - March 10, 2017
Steam is constantly changing and, like us, adapting to the users requests and feedback.
The latest update to Steam is how they are changing how review scores are calculated removing free games (promotions), gifts and free weekend reviews from the overall calculated score.
This was after feedback that friends gifted the game, with no interest in the type of genre, would review the game with a joke, or unfair judgement which would tank a games fair score. This should adjust how Steam Reviews are generally ignored and instead may become a valid source of review.
One thing of note, is how Steam are really trying to recover their muddled mess of a platform since the greenlight game fiasco allowing floods of asset flip unity games on the platform, and now hoping to revamp the ratings should help.
Check out the blog below:
We're in the process of making a couple more small changes to Steam Customer Review system as we continue to fine-tune the relevance and accuracy of the overall review score for each product.
In September, we made some adjustments to how the review score was calculated for each product. You can read about those changes and the reasoning behind it here. We're continuing with a few more changes in this direction to improve the relevance of the score by better reflecting the sentiment expressed by invested, paying customers.
With the changes we are making now, the review score (shown at the top of store pages and in various places throughout the store such as search results) will no longer include reviews by users that received the game for free, such as via a gift, or during a free weekend. Reviews can still be written by customers that obtained the game in any of these ways, but the review will not count toward the overall review score.
We started rolling out this change earlier this week, and it will take a few more days for our system to completely update all reviews and re-calculate the scores. In the meantime, you may see the review score on a game change a couple of times depending on how many reviews come from the sources mentioned above.
This change only affects games that are listed for sale on Steam. For free or free-to-play games, reviews by all users will continue to count toward their review score.
As always, please let us know what you think.
Do you pay attention to the reviews?