Valve Will Remove ‘Off-Topic Review Bombs’ from the Calculation of Steam’s Review Score of Games
Valve announced on Friday that it was planning to combat review bombing on Steam by removing those types of user reviews from the overall review score calculation of games on the platform.
“We define an off-topic review bomb as one where the focus of those reviews is on a topic that we consider unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game,” Valve’s announcement read, “and hence not something that should be added to the Review Score.”
The announcement mentioned that there was a “grey area” when it came to identifying these types of reviews and the company explained that it has developed an analytics tool that will identify “any anomalous review activity on all games on Steam in as close to real-time as possible.”
The tool will notify Valve about these anomalies and the company will investigate the reviews in order to determine if they’re legitimate or not.
“Once our team has identified that the anomalous activity is an off-topic review bomb, we’ll mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer,” Valve explained. “The reviews within that time period will then be removed from the Review Score calculation. As before, the reviews themselves are left untouched – if you want to dig into them to see if they’re relevant to you, you’ll still be able to do so.”
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