Valve has announced the start of testing the new system on Steam. His job is to present to potential customers more helpful reviews. The system will prioritize reviews that are most helpful to customers in their purchasing decisions. This “utility system” is used by default, but it's also easy to disable for each game.
Many users use Steam reviews to share jokes, memes, ASCII images and other content, which doesn't exactly help a potential customer twice. According to the company, such content is mostly fine and may entertain existing owners, but it simply has no general value for newcomers.
“The primary goal of user reviews on Steam is to help potential customers make informed decisions about individual games through the pros and cons of existing owners,” reported by Valve.
“User reviews identified as unhelpful to potential customers (such as one-word reviews, reviews consisting of ASCII images, or reviews primarily focused on memes and reference jokes) are now automatically ranked below other reviews of the game. This doesn't mean that users will never see them, but hopefully it will result in them seeing less of them when they are trying to get really valuable information. Plus, we don't prevent anyone from including these reviews again (or mix them in with those with more informative value).” Valve explains.
This the change does not affect the calculation of the summary of ratings for individual gamesthis is only a change in the order of user reviews.
On this occasion, Valve revealed that users have written more than 140 million reviews on Steam.