Do you skip right down to the player review section for any Steam game to see what the populace thinks of a particular title? Just know that as of yesterday, these reviews won’t be including some of the players who want to share their thoughts on these games.
Valve announced yesterday that it will henceforth be filtering out player reviews from accounts that activated a game key instead of purchasing the title directly from the site. “We are also changing the default review score that we show at the top of each product page (and in search results) to not include reviews written by users that obtained the product through a Steam key,” the company said.
The reason given for this change is that Valve claims that developers are giving out too many free keys to influence their player review scores. However, this change also impacts smaller developers and those who receive their keys from Kickstarter rewards, and those affected are not pleased by the move.
Valve said it’s looking into other ways to combat what it says is abuse of the review system by players and studios.
