Steam has made a lot of advancements in 2019 when you take a moment to look at it in its most recent blog post. From the Remote Play feature that lets people play couch co-op games together online, to Steam’s own VR headest, to community events like its Spring Cleaning event and Steam Awards, it’s been a busy 2019. One of the advancements Valve is most proud of, though, is its efforts to minimize the effects of review bombing, which has been halted a total of 44 times in 2019.
Readers will recall that the subject of review bombing was first addressed in September of 2017 and was further refined in March of last year including the setup of a team that identifies review bombing attempts and isolates them from the overall score in order to keep user reviews fair. “Users Reviews are consistently one of the most used features on the Store, garnering as many page hits as Search, so it’s important that they are accurate and trustworthy,” explains the post.
How much can a review bomb affect a game’s overall perception? One need only look at the current kerfuffle surrounding Warcraft III: Reforged, which has achieved the lowest user MetaCritic score in the site’s history. Of course, review bombing on Steam has a much more direct effect on sales and so generally requires more oversight.
The Steam dev blog further outlines plans for more advancements in 2020, including promise of multi-part blog posts that will offer data deep dives and showcase how games are doing on Steam, expansion of the Steam PC Cafe Program, version 2.0 of SteamVR, and additional sale events like the recent Lunar New Year sale.
