STEAM

[jurassicjim]

Like I say, I understand why developers are up in arms about it, but also get why Steam have done it.

I would have thought that overall, the changes should make the reviews more genuine, when you take every game played through Steam into account

j

[Tappy]

Steam aren't a reviewing site, so I think they're justified to do this. If you want reviews from everyone, go to... erm... Trusted Reviews or something.

[scarbunny]

Source of the post I do understand the outrage from developers after reading a bit about this.

But from a platform point of view, it makes total sense for Steam to do this surely? It does ensure that a higher percentage of the reviews will be genuine.

j

It also incentivises developers to only sell through Steam, potentially netting Steam more profits, rather than either selling direct or via sites like GoG, which is better for the dev and the customer, further enhancing Steam's almost monopoly for PC gaming.

I hate Steam, the client is terrible, its a has so many jaggies on a high resolution screen I find it uncomfortable to use and I have never forgiven them for forcing me to use Steam for the physical copy of Dawn of War.

[jurassicjim]

I have never forgiven them for forcing me to use Steam for the physical copy of Dawn of War.

Is that not the developers fault?

j

[jurassicjim]

Source of the post

I have never forgiven them for forcing me to use Steam for the physical copy of Dawn of War.

Is that not the developers fault?

j

[Johnmcl7]

I see the review change as bad for everyone, as a consumer I'll potentially miss out on good games when there's few reviews which makes it look worse and there's been high profile examples of the Steam reviews being untrustworthy compared to the non-Steam purchases.

I generally hated Steam particularly for its complete lack of any error handling ability whatsoever although I've softened on it since using Origin and Uplay, I took the two games I bought on Uplay as an expensive lesson why never to buy anything on Uplay again as there was (possibly still is) a bug where the download maxes out your connection and prevents anything else using it while downloading at a trickle meaning it was going to take two weeks downloading 24 hours a day to download one game. Better yet, you can't transfer the save game content so you have to download it on each machine you want to use it and redownload it if the machine has its OS rebuilt.

John

[jurassicjim]

I see they have changed again...

http://steamed.kotaku.com/valve-changes ... 1786875457

Looks like score is based of Steam purchasers and text reviews from everyone.

Seems like a decent compromise?

j

[Johnmcl7]

I actually thought that was how it was working already, I didn't realise they were effectively hiding all the user reviews. I still think as a consumer it's a bad system as there's a lot of games I'd probably skip over because their rating only comes from a handful of reviews whereas if I see one that's positive that has hundreds of reviews then I'm much more likely to pick it up or spend more time reading some reviews. One of the VR bundle games which is now for sale has gone from a positive rating with hundreds of reviews to just four reviews now counting out of 181 reviews and the same issues are occurring with Kickstarter games or similar. I think there's much better ways to deal with people cheating the system particularly when the new system still allows it to be cheated which is also clearly happening, I'd rather see the rating difference between both or even simply two ratings - one from Steam purchasers, one from non-Steam purchasers and I can see myself if there's a big difference.

John