The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Infinitron]

From the Codex inbox:

Hi,

I just launched a website which lists Steam games by actual playing time. The site aims to help people find the really good worthwhile games they may miss due to hype or whatever and focuses on which games are actually played a lot by their owners.

Anyways, you should probably judge by yourself if it's useful: http://www.timesteam.net

All the best!

 

[Baron Dupek]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...g79J7fDe3ulOc6DgJl6ByhYMnD0/htmlview?sle=true
This is list made by SteamSpy guy, bunch of never-heard indie garbage got hit, feels like judgement night for them

 

[gaussgunner]

From the Codex inbox:

Hi,

I just launched a website which lists Steam games by actual playing time. The site aims to help people find the really good worthwhile games they may miss due to hype or whatever and focuses on which games are actually played a lot by their owners.

Anyways, you should probably judge by yourself if it's useful: http://www.timesteam.net

All the best!

Ehh. Looks like a lot of...
1. MMORPGs
2. Bestseller AAA games
3. Older games (more total playtime...)
4. Tediously slow games

 

[Goral]

They should remove reviews from people who got refunds of reviewed games. What can one know about a game when playing only 2h? And if a game is really that short (there probably are very short games out there) you would still have the option to get a refund yourself.

 

[LESS T_T]

PCGN gathered opinions from a number of developers: http://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-user-reviews-developer-opinions

Some quotes:

Tom Francis, Suspicious Developments - Gunpoint

“I do feel bad for devs negatively affected by this change without warning. But I also think the new rule is not unreasonable. It's pretty extraordinary that Valve give us limitless free keys we can sell for pure profit and give them nothing - if they need to tweak how their site views those sales to prevent it being exploited, I still feel like I'm getting a good deal.”

Alexis Kennedy, Failbetter & Freelance - Sunless Sea

“The key thing to my mind is that this won't be the final situation. Valve like to make big sweeping simple changes based on data, not people - it's a technocratic, programmer's mindset.

“But they always iterate on those changes. An effective review system is essential for the store's health, so that's always their priority. But they know perfectly well that Steam has competitors, and they always have an eye on the long term. So I imagine they're throwing the bathwater out, fully intending to pick up the baby later when they've heard how loudly it squeaks. What we as devs need to do is squeak loudly, firmly and not too apocalyptically. They do care about indies, but only in aggregate.

“It's hurting community-driven indies right now, and my heart goes out to the people who've seen their scores lurch downwards, but it's what happens when you have a market hegemon, even a relatively benign one. And in the long term building a community will still pay off.”

Gary Chambers, Introversion - Prison Architect

“To me it seems like a solution to a problem that no one was having. They said it was about 160 games that had "suspicious" reviews on them, out of what must be over 6000 at this point. And they are clearly able to detect when this is happening, so if they were so concerned about it, with such low numbers they could easily just review it manually every now and then.

“And the impact this has on a number of developers is pretty severe - I've seen quite a few people today saying that their average reviews have dropped significantly as a result of this, primarily those who had kickstarters or did well in things like the Humble Bundle. The reality is that Steam reviews do have a noticeable impact on a game's sales, and having reviews cut like that is a pretty big blow.

“We're pretty lucky with Prison Architect in that the vast majority of our reviews are from people who bought through Steam, so this hasn't had much noticeable impact on its average, but there are plenty of games not in that position. Hopefully they change their minds on this and restore all of these lost reviews.”

Brian Hicks, Bohemia - DayZ

“The changes to Steam's user reviews are an example of a repeat issue with Steam as a platform. Frequently Valve fails to properly discuss or inform developers of large scale changes that are made to both store pages, and the store as a whole. Going back to the implementation of user reviews, and culminating in issues such as refunds, and workshop mod monetization. However, I honestly don't see this behaviour pattern changing any time in the future. This leaves us as developers forced to rapidly adapt to changes that directly impact our success on the platform.

[...]

“So, we find ourselves here again at Valve's mercy as indie developers. Having to adapt with little, or almost no notice to systems that can greatly impact our marketplace presence and consumer perception. Don't get me wrong, Steam offers a vast amount of major benefits that allow indie developers to toss aside the traditional evil publisher model - but at what point does this start to become enough of an issue that having that safety blanket of an established, and powerful publisher starts becoming more appealing?”

 

[MRY]

They said it was about 160 games that had "suspicious" reviews on them, out of what must be over 6000 at this point. And they are clearly able to detect when this is happening, so if they were so concerned about it, with such low numbers they could easily just review it manually every now and then.

And the impact this has on a number of developers is pretty severe - I've seen quite a few people today saying that their average reviews have dropped significantly as a result of this, primarily those who had kickstarters or did well in things like the Humble Bundle.

Does not compute. Valve did not use the word "suspicious" -- so I'm not sure why it's in quotes. Here's what Valve actually said:

An analysis of games across Steam shows that at least 160 titles have a substantially greater percentage of positive reviews by users that activated the product with a cd key, compared to customers that purchased the game directly on Steam.

Whatever the number of developers who have suffered a "pretty severe" impact from the change is exactly equal to the number of developers who had games where there was a "substantially greater percentage of positive reviews by users that activated the product with a cd key." The numbers can't be different. There can be innocent victims, but not collateral damage.

It's slightly annoying for us with Primordia -- we lost 20 positive reviews and none that are negative, and presumably some of those 20 reviews were not from people who got free keys but from people who bought the game directly from WEG or bought it in a bundle. But 20/975 is not that significant a percentage, and -- with the exception of Shardlight -- I don't see any evidence of WEG titles being affected.

The claim is that it hurts Kickstarted games, but I don't see that, either. For example, I have the sense that Quest for Infamy sold most of its copies through either Kickstarter or bundles. But it lost only 10/84 reviews. Nothing to sneeze at, but hardly a "pretty severe" impact. Dropsy was also Kickstarted and quickly bundled. It lost 142/552 reviews, which is a bit more, and maybe qualifies as "pretty severe," though it seems to actually have raised Dropsy's review score, so on balance it doesn't seem so bad. Telepath Tactics was Kickstarted and bundled and only lost 2/84 reviews. Dead State was Kickstarted and bundled and lost only 68/1386 reviews. Statis was Kickstarted, not usre if it has been bundled, and lost 94/675 reviews. In other words, the idea that the overwhelming number of reviews on popularly Kickstarted projects are coming from free keys seems not to be true -- it ranges from a signficant but modest minority to a negligible minority.

Obviously some innocent games were probably adversely affected, but I haven't really seen any concrete evidence of that yet. It's a tragedy when even a single game, into which people poured love and time, is hurt, but I think there is a case to be made that distortions that allow some inferior games to have better ratings hurt every other game, so it's not like there is a path here down which no one is hurt.

The other aspect of this, which seems to have been relatively unmentioned, is that I will go through weeks where I receive at least a couple emails a day by people posing as Let's Players or Steam Community leaders or some such nonsense, asking for free keys to distribute, always with a promise that positive reviews will follow. I am 99.9% sure that these are simply key-reseller scams and that no good reviews would have come (except through natural processes, i.e., the end-purchaser actually likes the game enough to review it), but such scams prove either the existence of, or the perceived existence of, a market for fake Steam reviews. Bear in mind, this is fucking Primordia we're talking about -- a four-year-old indie game that gets no press coverage or marketing support. To contact me requires first linking Primordia with Wormwood Studios, then linking Wormwood Studios with my email address -- in other words, mere automation can't do it. That makes me think that, by comparison, bigger games, publishers, more accessible developers, etc. must be receiving dozens of these things a day.

Valve has a very strong incentive to maintain the perceived integrity of their review system. Thus, even if free keys aren't actually hurting the integrity of the review system, Steam has every reason (and every right) to get out ahead of things and squash the (mis)perception that free keys are hurting the integrity of the review system. That may also have the indirect effect of putting a stop to these scams.

I should add, by the way, that if an added consequence of this is to deter bundling, that will almost certainly be good, not bad, for indie developers in the long run.

Finally, it seems to me that there will be a way of fixing this such that Kickstarter keys are redeemed directly through a Steam widget (like what Humble did for a while). Once that's taken care of, I really don't see much grounds for protest.

 

[gaussgunner]

I will go through weeks where I receive at least a couple emails a day by people posing as Let's Players or Steam Community leaders or some such nonsense, asking for free keys to distribute, always with a promise that positive reviews will follow. I am 99.9% sure that these are simply key-reseller scams ........
Bear in mind, this is fucking Primordia we're talking about -- a four-year-old indie game that gets no press coverage or marketing support. To contact me requires first linking Primordia with Wormwood Studios, then linking Wormwood Studios with my email address -- in other words, mere automation can't do it.

Yup, every unknown indie dev with a game on steam gets those. So many losers willing to work from home, making pennies doing scammy shit. It's like collecting bottles without leaving the comfort of your Section 8 apartment. I was thinking 'piecework service' like Mechanical Turk, but they're probably working directly for the key resellers, no middleman necessary.

 

[Metro]

Streaming is a cottage industry now. Every 20-something year old momo who can't get a real job wants to be the next Pewdipie or Total Derpscut.

 

[Caim]

Streaming is a cottage industry now. Every 20-something year old momo who can't get a real job wants to be the next Pewdipie or Total Derpscut.

So either a depressed Swede or a cancer patient?

 

[sullynathan]

Streaming is a cottage industry now. Every 20-something year old momo who can't get a real job wants to be the next Pewdipie or Total Derpscut.

So either a depressed Swede or a cancer patient?

depressed with millions?

 

[Caim]

Streaming is a cottage industry now. Every 20-something year old momo who can't get a real job wants to be the next Pewdipie or Total Derpscut.

So either a depressed Swede or a cancer patient?

depressed with millions?

Notch is worth billions yet he is chronically unhappy and buys himself thick heavy curtains to block the windows of his top-tier LA apartment so he can play games. Mo money Mo jang.

 

[Metro]

Probably because that fatso has blood sugar levels that are through the roof. Candy wall.

 

[sullynathan]

Streaming is a cottage industry now. Every 20-something year old momo who can't get a real job wants to be the next Pewdipie or Total Derpscut.

So either a depressed Swede or a cancer patient?

depressed with millions?

Notch is worth billions yet he is chronically unhappy and buys himself thick heavy curtains to block the windows of his top-tier LA apartment so he can play games. Mo money Mo jang.

But Pewdiepie has an attractive girlfriend, and lots of money and seems always happy. Doubt he's depressed.

 

[Baron Dupek]

girlfriend, and lots of money

you don't see the connection yet?

seems always happy. Doubt he's depressed.

Spoiler

 

[sullynathan]

yeah, he did look bored with his girl. She has an annoying voice.

 

[Caim]

yeah, he did look bored with his girl. She has an annoying voice.

Didn't she used to do porn or something?

 

[sullynathan]

yeah, he did look bored with his girl. She has an annoying voice.

Didn't she used to do porn or something?

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/09/15/steam-user-reviews/

We Spoke To Developers About Steam User Reviews

Recent changes to Steam reviews, which filter out reviews from keys that weren’t purchased directly through Valve’s digital store, have caused all sorts of worry and concern. The intent is to remove false positives in the form of reviews exchanged for keys and the like, but legitimate reviews are also affected. Games that were Kickstarted no longer have their backers’ assessment contributing toward the rating Steam displays at the top of the page, and people buying through Humble Bundles or elsewhere are similarly excluded by default.


We contacted a variety of developers and publishers, including Larian, Stardock and Mode 7, to hear if they thought the move might stamp down on unfair practices, or whether it would end up hurting rather than helping.


Loyalty, abuse and manipulation

Developers who have run successful crowdfunding campaigns were among those who showed immediate concern about the changes, and Swen Vincke, founder of Larian (who ran successful Kickstarters for Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel) captured the feeling of many who got in touch with me:

Well, these are your most loyal fans and so you’re cutting them away from the sampling pool. That doesn’t really feel fair. We have 42K backers whose opinion will be hidden behind a filter and not be accounted for in the score. If we sell say 500K units (which would be a success for a top-down turn-based RPG), that’s almost 10% of our audience. I don’t know what the statistical significance will be – it doesn’t seem to have made a big difference for Divinity:Original Sin 1 – but I can imagine that in the early days, when the opinions of early adopters are important, it might hurt us that the adopters with the strongest interest in the game won’t be heard, at least not in a way that matters. And since initial opinions often seem to set the trend, that feels like a loss for us. But as I said, I do understand why they’re doing it. A score only matters if you can trust it and I can imagine there was a lot of abuse and manipulation going on.​

Not everyone has to imagine the abuse and manipulation. Brad Wardell, founder and CEO of Stardock, reckons the changes are for the good as they’ll help to fix one of the main problems with Steam reviews.

I really like the changes. It’s been one of the worst kept secrets that some studios were gaming the review system by handing out copies to super fans so that they could launch with 99% review scores. What will be interesting is when people start to notice those who were doing this.

The Steam review system is still very punishing to certain types of games. Particularly games with high hardware requirements as most PC gamers think their 5 year old machine is still state of the art and won’t accept that a game plays slowly on it. That could be solved if reviews by players who were refunded weren’t included in the rating. But overall, the Steam review system is still the best system currently available in my opinion.​

Sean Colombo of BlueLine Games says this gaming of the review system is a trend that he’s noticed recently, the studio having first released a game on Steam in early 2014. The way he describes it, studios are approached by people willing to provide reviews in exchange for keys, and he understands why some developers might be tempted:

There is a new trend that Eastern Euro/Russian players will contact you in hordes to offer Steam Reviews of your game if you give them a free copy. As long as they don’t promise a positive review (which is super sketchy), that actually might be worth it for a lot of devs since a small pool of reviews is dangerous… until you have a bunch of total reviews, one bad review puts you in “Mixed” territory which will basically stone-wall your game’s growth.​

Throwing out the data with the bathwater

Founders of Mode 7, Paul Kilduff-Taylor and Ian Hardingham, who are currently working on Frozen Synapse 2, also recognise that Valve needed to deal with “a real problem”. Hardingham appreciates concerns that the solution causes its own problems though:

Valve is unusually flexible with allowing developers to register as many keys with their system as you like – allowing us to sell hundreds of thousands of Steam keys through a Humble Bundle for instance. It also allows us to send out many promotional copies and run closed betas in any way we see fit. This is incredibly developer-friendly in comparison to some other distributors: I would never want Valve to change it.

Exempting non-Steam user reviews from the overall score is a response to a real problem where developers are giving out free games in return for good reviews. I would much rather Valve did this than change their open approach to external keys. However I do think you could look to remove specific accounts which have questionable reviewing/activating behavour and possibly get 90% of the benefit without losing the large amount of valid data that’s being thrown out with the bathwater here.​

Kilduff-Taylor thinks similarly:

It’s frustrating that the idiotic behaviour of a few unscrupulous people has, once again, forced changes to a system which affects everyone. I definitely appreciate that Valve need to find a way of shutting down this type of fraud, though.

There is certainly an issue here for developers who want to release alphas on their own site, then make the jump to Steam at a later stage. The players that get hold of a game early on often tend to be some of the most passionate and vocal: they now won’t get to contribute to the game’s overall score. It’s a small thing – and it’s great that they will still be allowed to leave comments – but it could potentially have an impact.

Ultimately, everyone should be striving to make games which are well received throughout their life-cycle by different types of player: as long as developers stick to that, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about here.​

Navigating the mountain of shovelware

Developers are worried though and many of those worries seem to come from young studios and those that were already worried about issues on Steam, including visibility and the difficulty of not being buried beneath the “mountain of shovelware”. That’s a phrase used by Adam Blahuta of Jellyfish Games, who was originally excited by the prospects of Steam Early Access, but now feels it might not be the best place for his game:

…Steam’s Early Access program excited me when it launched. The two most obvious benefits were early feedback and early revenue. The former would challenge our assumptions about the experiences our game provides and the latter would allow us to improve the game’s quality and marketing material prior to launch.

At first, only the most eager of early adopters bought these unfinished games. They generally came with an understanding of what they were getting for their money and would frame their reviews accordingly. The more Early Access became popular, the more players started to flood in. There was an obvious shift in tone as the generally constructive pool of reviews started to get overshadowed by obnoxious negative reviews based on a misunderstanding of what one should expect of a game prior to release.

What made matters worse was the mountain of shovelware that made it through the now relaxed Greenlight approval process. As these titles started to garner almost as much attention as the quality games in development, this created a perception that most Early Access games were garbage.

This means that anybody who buys a game in alpha with incorrect assumptions or coming at it from a negative mindset is more likely to post a negative review. If the review’s criticism is undeserved, this will unfairly affect sales, which will turn away people who would enjoy the game. Once things start going in the wrong direction, it can be very difficult to come back from that, no matter how much work you put into your subsequent updates. This makes it incredibly important to come up with a sales strategy that mitigates the impact of these undeserved reviews.​

Colombo, at the digital boardgame developer Blueline mentioned above, has experience with a launch that backfired, although not for entirely predictable reasons. His story highlights how another recent change to user reviews – the introduction of a recent reviews filter – can help when a game stumbles out of the gates. Particularly since players very rarely update their reviews, even when developers update their games:

Users will sometimes update reviews, but not often. This means you have to be really careful when you launch. We launched Simply Chess for free on Steam (mostly because I love Chess and our board-game engine is really powerful… didn’t think many people would play it) with a “Premium” version (which is practically a donation). …our two-person team tested it, but we didn’t do Early Access or anything…. then we had a couple hundred thousand users in the first couple of days. Not only do this many users find way more bugs than we found, but they also caused issues that we had never seen in our other games (eg: more than 1,500 concurrent games made the list of in-progress-games really laggy). We understandably got negative reviews, but even though we were able to get almost every reported bug solved through several updates within the week, very few of the negative reviewers updated their reviews.

When Steam released their “recent reviews” feature, this gave us a second-chance since it was a strong signal to new users, that the game was worth their time even though the Launch was rough.
It took many months to get the amount of eyeballs on the game to outweigh the initial bad reviews. Some users update their reviews which helped a lot, but many more didn’t want to spend the time looking at a free game again.​

And then there are those developers who seem to see this as yet another potentially confusing and hazardous aspect of an already baffling marketplace. Roger Valldeperas, developer of Flat Heroes, a game our Graham praised just yesterday, is still learning to navigate Steam as a dev and seeing the layout change feels like a setback:

…overnight we lost over 2/3 of our reviews (it’s still not much in real numbers because we don’t have many reviews yet, but way worse because that same reason, we didn’t have many and we have even less now), and that left the game in a worse position than it already was, because when you release a new game and are not a known dev you rely almost entirely on press, streamers and giveaways, since pretty much nobody will buy a game that has not appeared on the press and has no reviews on Steam.

From these 3, press and streamers receive way too many e-mails to cover half of the game (among many other sites we sent RPS a press release with a key) so many devs are left with no other choice than trying to give some keys to random strangers hoping they’ll like the game and will tell their friends, and maybe add a review (although I’m completely against asking for reviews in exchange of keys).

That said, even if in our specific case it was kind of unfair because of the timing (we had worse release conditions than the others before us), I do think it is a good measure overall, something had to be done with all the keys-for-reviews market, which was getting worryingly huge (like many devs, we received lots of e-mails asking for keys in exchange of good reviews).​

Don’t panic?

To those worried developers, Failbetter founder-gone-freelance-writer Alexis Kennedy has a brief message. Valve, he reckons, have been here before, and they’ll steady the ship if it springs a leak.

My thoughts: DON’T PANIC. Valve’s modus operandi is to make a swingeing change with no warning, watch the explosions, and then calmly recalibrate. You can call this heartless, you can call it far-sighted, but it’s what they do. It’s horrible that honest developers with strong communities have suffered from this. But making good games and having a strong community is the best kind of future-proofing there is, if you can ride out this one.

The important thing, as Danny Day has pointed out, is to give them feedback so they can know what to change. Valve needs us too; even they have competitors; and they think about the long term.​

Eugene Hopkinson of VoxelStorm, creators of AdvertCity, doesn’t call the changes “heartless”, as in Kennedy’s quote; he sees them as “an aggressive market control move”:

…any reviews that came from bundle sales have of course been removed from the count as well – and if a backer pays $2 for a bundle of a dozen games late in their life cycle, they’re far likely to judge the games less harshly than if they paid the full Steam $20 price early in the same game’s release history – an effect that’s compounded by the fact that early purchasers were more likely to encounter bugs that were ironed out in later iterations.

The fundamental problem, from our perspective, is that the system is rewarding the (proportionally more negative) opinions of early purchasers and disregarding the (predominantly more positive) perspectives of those who have obtained their key through another kind of interaction than a full price Steam purchase; for a game like AdvertCity with a very steep learning curve, the Kickstarter backers (for instance) are far more likely to play the game for longer, and our data has shown that with this game, play time is directly correlated to whether we receive a positive review from them or not. The net effect has been that this game’s overall rating on Steam has dropped from an unreserved “positive” down to a “mixed” overnight. It seems as though this is really an indirect way for Steam to punish bundles, third party stores and so forth, as well as dissuading the developers who use them – an aggressive market control move.​

Bundles and benefits

Some developers have seen very different results regarding Bundle sales though, saying that eliminating reviews from external sources has actually boosted their Steam rating. Here’s Michael Molinari, developer of Choice Chamber:

I’m happy about Steam’s review change, as it’s brought my reviews back to Very Positive, from Mixed. I had less than 10k units purchased through Steam, but being in the summer Humble Bundle sent total units to over 110k, bringing with it lots of negative reviewers who likely didn’t even want the game to begin with.​

Peter Willington of Auroch Digital tells me the same is true of some of Auroch’s titles, though also says that “this change basically nerfs the voices of the strongest advocates of projects borne out of crowdfunding”:

…the change has actually been beneficial for us so far: we’ve seen the scores of some of our titles slightly rise.

We think this is something to do with those games being somewhat niche. The people who buy our games directly from Steam tend to be passionate and vocal and really appreciate that we’re making the kinds of games they like. But we’ve also had these games appear in bundles, which puts them in front of players who might not be the target audience, and they subsequently mark the game down in a review for not being the kind of mainstream game they expected. Those bundle reviews now don’t count towards the rating, pushing our score higher.​

Simon Roth, developer of Maia, has created a Patreon, partly as a result of these changes, which he reacted too with a degree of despair. He told me how he thinks Steam reviews could be improved as a whole:

…the issue with Steam reviews is it’s built in a way that doesn’t really benefit anyone. The system needs to focus on giving detailed information about a game to players and demand that from reviewers. Reviews should address aspects of the game and guide the reviewer with some structure to maximize its worth. A system like this would remove all the “funny” reviews, the low effort ones and also reduce the issues of scammers as it would no longer be a viable business model for them. A level of Valve managed light community moderation on top of that would filter out the rest of the chaff. I know Valve have very little interest in putting any manpower into such things, but not everything can be automated away.

Users should be given the choice to directly message the developers before writing a review. So many reviews are just tech support problems in disguise. Using the user’s survey data to present what machine they played on would also allow purchasers to know if a performance or tech issue might affect them.​

I’ll leave the final word to Blahuta, whose closing paragraph to me captured what a lot of indies – particularly those without established names or communities – were saying to me:

I’m an indie developer who’s been working on a passion project for a little over 2 years and I’d really like to start selling an alpha build soon. If I go with Steam Early Access, I’m taking a risk that I’ll drag any early negative reviews with me all the way to full release which will hurt my sales in the most critical period. If I do my alpha release outside of Steam (Itch.io, the game’s website, etc.), I’ll still get the benefits of alpha while only having Steam reviews from the final version, when they are most likely to be positive. However, with Steam’s latest changes to user reviews, any champions of my game won’t be able post visible user reviews on Steam launch day because they’ll be using activated keys they were given as part of the sale outside of Steam. So, what do I do?​

 

[Drax]

Bunch of babies.

 

[Luka-boy]

I’m an indie developer who’s been working on a passion project for a little over 2 years and I’d really like to start selling an alpha build soon. If I go with Steam Early Access, I’m taking a risk that I’ll drag any early negative reviews with me all the way to full release which will hurt my sales in the most critical period. If I do my alpha release outside of Steam (Itch.io, the game’s website, etc.), I’ll still get the benefits of alpha while only having Steam reviews from the final version, when they are most likely to be positive. However, with Steam’s latest changes to user reviews, any champions of my game won’t be able post visible user reviews on Steam launch day because they’ll be using activated keys they were given as part of the sale outside of Steam. So, what do I do?

Whine about it on social media, obviously!

 

[MRY]

Incidentally, all of this goes to underscore my belief (applicable to me as much as anyone else) that people's ostensible concerns about "process" almost always boil down to actual concerns about what substantively benefits them the most. For example, none of these developers seems to have stopped for a moment to wonder whether, for example, having the Steam reviews page plastered with puff pieces written by the "champions of my game" and upvoted by other "champions of my game" is actually useful to end consumers or whether, in fact, in consumers might benefit more from more detached reviews posted by people who were not involved in the development of the game and were not in the tight circle of fandom around the game's developer.

The more I reflect about this, the more it seems appropriate that Kickstarter reviews be treated as opt-in, "eccentric" reviews that players can look at, but which are treated as less inherently useful than other reviews. Frankly, Early Access reviews should be in the same category. Kickstarter reviews often come in two stripes: (1) "the developer promised features X, Y, and Z, but did not deliver upon them" and (2) "I have spent the past five years supporting the developer, cheerleading for the developer, fighting to get this game Greenlit, spamming social media about this game, and now it's finally out, and let me tell you why my religion is the one true faith." I'm not sure either of these kinds of reviews is ideal for consumers, but they dominate the ratings page because there is usually a critical mass of like-minded owners who will upvote their faction (and, I suppose, downvote the other faction).

But in writing this, I wonder whether in fact My Agenda is that (1) I haven't Kickstarted a project and never will; (2) I don't post reviews of games and thus lose nothing by the fact that many of my keys come from backing Kickstarter projects; (3) Primordia's user rating percentage was not affected by this change*; and (4) other games Primordia competes with were adversely affected by it. Probably, if I had woken up and Primordia had lost 100 ratings and had fallen behind other WEG titles, I would be screaming bloody murder about fairness, equity, and the universal right to pad your stats.

(* For the record, the change does adversely affect TTON, knocking it below the 80% threshold. I'm somewhat surprised by that fact, which suggests that most of the blowback about features has come not from backers but from EA purchasers?)

 

[Thane Solus]

1) Most of the developers, even the smalls ones are not really affected by this unless they got bogus ratings, but nothing good can come of it unless point (3). They only influence maybe 1-5% of the ratings.

Kickstarter reviews yes can be tricky, but if the game is hipster enough, they will get the reviews the normal way i guess...

2) This is a very scummy move, while in the past you could get a few positive review from friends to boost up, now if you really want to do that, you have to give money to valve. Just like triple A companies do, buy 1000 steam users to rate the game, so they boost the popularity. But now all the money goes to Steam, and Valve did this precisely for this reason, they dont give a fuck about fair scores.

3) The biggest problems with Steam Reviews, is that yes and no buttons to recommend a review are accessible to even those that dont have the game, which can influence and manipulate the overall game score:

a) company A calls 100 manboons to downvote a review. They dont even have to have the game, they just need a steam account...+1
b) company B calls 1000 manboons to upvote a review - same thing
c) thanks Valve...

On my first game on steam, i gave at some point a few keys for testing. Next days 2 manboons posted negative reviews ( cause thats testing in their minds ) and next second 50 of their friends came and upvoted the review without having the game. Thanks Valve! That is fair. It doesn't matter that i agreed with probably 50% of their "feedback".

Meanwhile in Real World for those that are clueless on releasing games:

Medium to Big companies buy reviews to boost the popularity of the game Steam, Google shit play, Itunes black hole etc. If an indie does it, to get 3-5 ratings they get an article on some shit journo site about he manipulated the world lol.

On steam they had to give only keys, now they will have to buy the game multiple times from Valve (NOW YOU GET IT?) its not about fairness, Valve saw an opportunity and toke it..

4) Another elephant in the room is, does the non steam reviews count in the popularity algorithm? Probably not, another fuck you from Valve.

Welcome to the Itunes/Google Play 2.0 the saviour of "PC" Gaming!

Fuck Valve and Gabe! i am moving slowly to GOG and on site selling, and treat Steam eventually as a third party shit store with any bit of luck in the following years.

They toke them 2 years to give you an email when your wishlist game is on sale... The only good update they had in 2 years...

 

[Turjan]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...g79J7fDe3ulOc6DgJl6ByhYMnD0/htmlview?sle=true
This is list made by SteamSpy guy, bunch of never-heard indie garbage got hit, feels like judgement night for them

This is interesting. I looked at the last game on this list, which jumped from a rating of 22% to one of 80%, by shedding 74 reviews and keeping only 5. That game is Elves Adventure, and if I look at the trailer, it looks like something I wouldn't buy. The game doesn't have elves or adventure. I'm not sure who bought this on Steam. Real enthusiasts? Friends of the makers? It's cheap. Probably some joke buys, if you look at one of the remaining positive reviews:

"recomend this game to gift to a friend you dont like as a way of showing you hate them 5/7 perfect"

 

[Baron Dupek]

*check Elves Adventure review*
NOT RECOMMENDED

NO ELVES in this game

the fuck
how is this a bad thing?

 

[MRY]

Wow. I can't tell if Elves Adventure is a joke or serious, but it made me laugh. Definitely worth looking at the video for it.