Valve Plans To Fight Steam Review Bombing By Making Users Do More Work
In an effort to combating "review bombing" on its Steam platform, Valve is rolling out a new feature. This comes after the critically acclaimed indie game "Firewatch" which had an overall "very positive" rating was recently dropped to "mixed" score following the developer's DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) on popular YouTuber PewDiePie.
For those not in the know, review bombing occurs when players post a mass number of negative reviews in a short window of time. After the recent incident with "Firewatch," Valve has now included a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game.
This allows users to accurately gauge the game's rating in its lifetime rather than the current score as in the case of the old review system. They click on any portion of the graph to see a selection of reviews from that particular period of time and see if there have been any distortions in the game's reviews.
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However, this doesn't exactly prevent players from review bombing games, but rather makes their efforts have less impact on the game's score. It also adds a little bit of work for potential buyers to decide whether a game is worth purchasing or not. Instead of just seeing if a particular game is good or bad, they now have to dig through a number of reviews to see the low scores are genuine.
The incident with "Firewatch" began when indie game developer Campo Santo issued a DMCA takedown notice on Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg to remove one of his "Firewatch" videos. This was after the UK-based Swedish YouTuber uttered a racial slur during one of his playthroughs.
The move was met with heavy criticism among gamers due to the fact that it wasn't even their game that was involved in the incident. They promptly went and review bomb the game on Steam, leading Valve to implement the new changes.
