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Why Steam’s New Review Policy Sucks for Indies

Why Steam’s New Review Policy Sucks for Indies

As we all know, reviews on Steam are a way for the average user to gauge how good or bad a game might be before they purchase it. In addition, the average review score is vital for the life of an indie game – it can determine whether the game lives or dies on Steam’s busy marketplace. However, it has come to Steam’s attention that, “the review score has also become a point of fixation for many developers, to the point where some developers are willing to employ deceptive tactics to generate a more positive review score.” This is not untrue, there have been incidents where developers have manipulated the review scores by handing out Steam keys (and sometimes money) for positive reviews. Some go even further, by creating alternate accounts and using the Steam keys there. This abuse is particularly obvious when the reviews are copy and pasted multiple times.

Though Valve seems to be aware that there is such thing as a legitimate review as a result of a Steam key (most professional reviewers get keys from developers, after all), it has decided to take action. Now, the review score “will no longer include reviews written by customers that activated the game through a Steam product key.” Not only that, those “that received the game from a source outside of Steam (e.g. via a giveaway site, purchased from another digital or retail store, or received for testing purposes from the developer) will still be able to write a review of the game on Steam to share their experience. These reviews will still be visible on the store page, but they will no longer contribute to the score.” You know, the score that decides the fate of most indie games.

Though I understand that this is a case of the few ruining it for the many, I really think this could have been handled differently. Especially the part where the Steam key was acquired through third party channels. I find this particularly frustrating because it means that the opinions of trustworthy reviewers (professional or not) who receive Steam codes to review games no longer see their scores count toward a game’s average. That could leave great games by developers who play by the rules in the dust.

Why Steam’s New Review Policy Sucks for Indies

It’s clear that Steam’s changes affect indie developers the most, and that’s a problem because these are the developers who cannot afford to compensate for this change. They need reviews, good or bad, to create publicity for their games. They can’t afford to make the game free for a weekend in order to drum up reviews from ordinary players. Steam key giveaways are also great for advertising and spreading the word about a game and are often the only way players even realize the game exists. If these early players love a game that they were given a key for, it’s a real shame that their positive score can’t help out the developer.

Indie games are near and dear to my heart and I can’t stand to see how a few bad apples have ruined the review score system for everyone else. Steam keys are essential to the indie developer for advertising and increasing their review score average. Unfortunately, I doubt there’s much we can do about it. Valve probably has no good way of detecting false reviews en masse . Thus, we’ll just have to pull up our bootstraps and hope people read the Steam key reviews rather than just looking at the average score, which is now determined by a smaller subset of players than it once was.

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