The ratings given by users to games on Steam are no longer taken into account if access to projects was obtained through a digital key.
On September 12, Valve published a post on its blog on the Steam distribution platform about the new rules for the Steam Customer Review System, a social add-in within which users can leave reviews of games.
According to the new rules, reviews of users who received the game by activating the digital key no longer affect the rating of the product. The rating of the game now takes into account only those reviews that are written by users who bought the game on Steam itself.
Valve explains the innovations with the desire to keep the Steam Customer Review System as transparent as possible, useful for users. The latter was hindered by numerous cheating of game ratings by developers before the new rules. Cheating, as a rule, was carried out by issuing keys.
“Most of the rating manipulations that we observe occur just during the distribution of Steam keys, which are then used to create positive reviews. Some developers have even created their own system using Steam keys on alternative accounts. Some organizations even offer paid services for writing positive reviews,” Valve said.
“Such a decision by Valve will allow you to remove from Steam the bot-inflated reviews of games that overestimate the rating of bad projects. This problem has become quite common lately and it’s good that Steam is struggling with it. Although this is not a full-fledged solution, but a patch, it will allow Steam to eliminate some of the problems with user reviews. It’s good. Kickstarter and Humble Bundle games will feel a loss in the number of reviews, but I don’t think this will significantly affect their average rating,” commented Sergey Galenkin, the author of the SteamSpy service and Head of Publishing in Eastern Europe at Epic Games.
Valve also announced that it was taking measures against those teams that were engaged in cheating ratings. Valve is going not only to delete purchased reviews (for example, those written from accounts associated with the developer’s account), but also to break off cooperation with developers who are engaged in cheating ratings.
In addition, Valve has introduced on Steam the ability to customize the issuance of reviews for each game by rating, type of purchase and language. Thanks to this, for example, you can see that out of 762 Steam reviews, The Underground Man – 759 are written in Russian.
Source: Valve