Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Steam, valve

More Changes To Steam: The Voting System Gets An Update

Steam announced today that their system will be getting some updates and changes, the biggest one of which is the voting system that people have come to rely on as to how well a game is going by popular vote. What could they possibly change about a system so simple that anyone can do it? They're making it so that not everyone can do it. Voting will be restricted to people who have been confirmed as purchasing and owning the game through Steam, removing any option for those who received the game for free (say, members of the press, or people who received Betas, or those who received them as a prize or giveaway) to add their input.

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.

The change actually happened earlier this week without any kind of input from the community, and the effects of the changes will slowly come about over the course of the next week or so as every single game vote score on Steam is recalculated and determined by the system.

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