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Valve fights back against unfair reviews on Steam

You can now see a timeline of positive and negative reviews.

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A while ago the world's most famous YouTuber PewDiePie uttered a racial slur while playing PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, in fact, directing towards a people as he cursed him out. After that Firewatch devs Campo Santo issued a DMCA takedown ordering content with their game down on PewDiePie's channel. PewDiePie since released an apology video.

Because of Campo Santo's actions, the fans of PewDiePie started bombing Firewatch on Steam with negative user reviews. Regardless of what you think of PewDiePie these reviews hardly reflect the quality of the game.

Valve has made a statement, that from now on "each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game, and by clicking on any part of the histogram you're able to read a sample of the reviews from that time period."

The idea is of course that users can see what user reviews are genuine and focused on the game itself, and what reviews are made to prove a point or hurt a specific developer or publisher financially. Another means to filter reviews has been suggested as games are often review bombed over poor server infrastructure or language problems in specific parts of the world, reviews that affect the overall rating of the game, while they're actually only applicable to the conditions in a certain country.

What is your opinion on Steam reviews and do you feel it is a problem when they are being used to prove a point?

Firewatch

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REVIEW. Written by Magnus Groth-Andersen

"In spite of the technical issues, this is certainly one of this year's first must-buy games."



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