Gamers who updated their Steam desktop app recently may have seen something a little new in their browsing experience: a feature that is visually prioritizing what Valve considers helpful reviews – and is thinning out the meme-filled ones.
“[O]ne-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes, will be sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page,” Valve explains. “That doesn’t mean players won’t ever see these humorous, but unhelpful posts, but it hopefully means that they’ll see them less frequently when trying to learn about a game.”
The company further points out that this change doesn’t affect how user scores are generated, and it notes that these goofy reviews can be filtered back in through an option on the store page.
Another change to Steam is coming in early September, when Valve will introduce new rules for game descriptions that don’t allow links to other websites, embedded imagery, or anything that directs browsers to other games on Steam. These rules are mostly being enforced as a result of changes made to demos last month and are being applied to limit player confusion and curtail a “trend” of devs linking to other products within Steam game descriptions.
