With today's Steam update, we are ready for public testing of a new system that changes the way Steam sorts user reviews on store pages with the goal of prioritizing reviews that can best help players make a purchase decision about the game. This new helpfulness system is now enabled by default, and can easily be toggled within the user review settings for each game.


The primary goal of Steam User Reviews is to help potential players make informed decisions about the games they are considering purchasing by understanding the attributes of the game that other players like or don't like. Historically we've sorted reviews by the number of 'helpful' votes given to each review by other players. However, we’ve seen that many players use reviews for sharing jokes, memes, ascii art and other content that might not be the most helpful for a potential purchaser. That content is usually fine, and often a lot of fun for existing customers of a game, but it doesn't always help new players in making informed purchasing decisions.


User reviews that are identified as being unhelpful for potential customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes, will be sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page. That doesn't mean players won't ever see these humorous, but unhelpful posts, but it hopefully means that they’ll see them less frequently when trying to learn about a game. If you enjoy seeing these sorts of reviews when browsing the store, there's an option on the store page to include them when browsing.

This change doesn't impact how review scores are generated for each game; it is simply changing the order that reviews appear on each store page.


As always, we learn from your feedback, so please feel free to leave a comment below.



Q: How does Steam determine which reviews are not informative?
A: Categorization work is a mix of techniques, including user reports, the Steam moderation team looking closely at a lot of reviews, and some machine learning algorithms to help scale the human judgement calls. Our team has found that a lot of the unhelpful reviews were easy to spot, so we're targeting those first. This is a work in process, and will likely take quite a while for our team to evaluate the existing reviews and newly posted reviews.

Q: Does it matter anymore if I mark a review as Helpful or not?
A: Marking a review as helpful or not is still taken into account.

Q: Can I help identify reviews that are not informative?
A: Our moderation team looks closer at reviews that are reported by other users, so the best thing you can do is report the review with a brief description of why. Please see Reporting Content in the Steam Community for more details.

Q: How can I compare this new system to what the old one returned?
A: You can easily do so by unselecting the option "Use new helpfulness system" under the "Display" drop-down just above the user reviews.

Q: Does it matter if a review is positive or negative during this evaluation?
A: No, the blue thumbs-up and red thumbs-down are not a factor in deciding whether a review is found to be informative.

Q. Got any interesting trivia about user reviews?
A. Steam players have posted well over 140 Million user reviews to date.

Q. If you've identified a review as unhelpful, why not delete the review?
A. We have found that many players want to express an opinion about the game, but don't always have the words to describe their experience with the game, or aren't interested in writing much. Their indication of whether they would recommend the game is still valuable data, even if they are not able to articulate why.

Q. Where can I learn more about the rules for User Reviews on Steam?
A. For more details, please see Rules and Guidelines For Steam: Discussions, Reviews, and User Generated Content

Steam's Tower Defense Fest is underway! From now until August 5 you'll find all sorts of ways to jump into defensive combat, destroy your enemies, and protect your home base.

Explore tons of Tower Defense titles, grab cool discounts, and check out demos on new games. Head on over to Steam's Tower Defense Fest anytime between now* and August 5th at 10am Pacific.

*Now is good.

With thousands of playable demos launching on Steam every year, and millions of players trying them out (often as part of Steam Next Fest), we've noticed some trends in feedback from both developers and players about the process and functionality. We've put together an update based on that feedback.

As a reminder, you can always find great demos to play on the Steam demo hub.

We've made a few updates to how demos appear and behave within the Steam Library. Here are the key items:

• You can add demos to your library without having to immediately install them. Just click on the new "add to library" button next to demos you may not be ready to install (while using the mobile app, for instance).
  
• Demos can be installed even if you already own the full game. Primarily, this will make it easier for developers to test demos, but it will also help players more easily manage installing/uninstalling demos.
  
• Demos can be explicitly removed from an account by right-clicking > manage > remove from account.
  
• When a demo is uninstalled, it will automatically get removed from your library.

By default, free demos appear as a button on the full game's store page. But, developers have been asking for a way to enable a full store page to better describe the contents of the demo, add separate screenshots, upload a trailer, and specify supported features. So, that is now possible and you'll find that clicking on a demo sometimes loads a full demo store page while other times will take you to the full game's page with a button to install the demo.

Stand-alone demo store pages will automatically display both the demo install button as well as a widget linking back to the full game for players interested in wishlisting or purchasing the full game.

If developers have chosen to enable a store page for their demo, it will also be possible for players of the demo to post user reviews for the demo. These reviews and review score will appear on the demo store page just like reviews for any other free game on Steam. Note that if the developer has chosen to not have a separate store page for their demo, then user reviews will not be enabled for that demo.



Demos now behave more like free games and can appear in all the same sections and lists. For example, demos can now appear on the Steam homepage in charts such as the "New & Trending", on the "New on Steam" page, and on relevant tag and category pages. We've also made some changes to the thresholds for free products to appear in those sections to better balance them with paid products.

Of course you can always find great demos to play on the Steam demo hub.

We've now also made it so that when a demo becomes available for the first time for a game that you have on your Steam wishlist, or from a developer you follow, Steam can send you an email and mobile notification about that demo.

You can opt in or out of these emails by updating your email preferences.



Q. What is the deal with the Demo icon? Is that a plate? A vinyl record?
A. That classic icon, my friend, is from the days when demos were commonly distributed through the post office, contained in a bound package of game journalism printed on dead trees and imprinted on circular media known as Compact Discs.

Q. Some demos just appeared in my Steam library. How did those get there?
A. We've made some changes to visibility of demos in the Steam Library, which may effect demos that you played long ago. We've tried our best to clean up the demos that we expect you don't care about anymore, but we may have missed some. You can easily remove those by right-clicking them in your Steam library and selecting manage > remove from account.

Q. I love free demos. When is the next Steam Next Fest?
A. Check back on October 14th for the next weeklong Steam Next Fest, featuring hundreds of new free playable demos! You can sign up for a reminder by visiting the Next Fest page now: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest