Steam's new 'Helpfulness' system for user reviews is here to fix Steam's 'Helpful' system for user reviews

(Image credit: NurPhoto (Getty Images))

In the ongoing, never-ending effort to make user reviews useful, rather than merely a conduit for rage and silliness, Valve has added a new feature to Steam that it hopes will make reviews more helpful for people who actually want to know more about the games they're thinking about buying.

Under the old regime, Steam users could vote on whether or not a review was helpful, and Steam would sort them accordingly, prioritizing those with high helpfulness ratings. The problem, as usual, is the Boaty McBoatface syndrome: When you let people on the internet vote on things, you're going to end up with shenanigans.

"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," Valve wrote, explaining the new helpfulness system, which is literally called the Helpfulness System. "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."

The Helpfulness System will deprioritize user reviews identified as unhelpful, including "one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes." Those reviews will still be viewable, but they'll now be sorted behind reviews that are deemed to be actually informative. The new system will not impact the generation of review scores—just the order in which user reviews appear on store pages.

The obvious question here, as the Insane Clown Posse once mused, is how does it work? As usual, it's all a bit opaque: Valve said helpfulness categorization "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 judgment calls," made necessary by the fact that "well over 140 million user reviews" have been posted on Steam. Interestingly, marking a review as helpful or not is still "taken into account," although to what extent is a mystery.

Also interesting is Valve's rationale for re-sorting user reviews, rather than just nuking the ones determined to be unhelpful. "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," Valve wrote. "Their indication of whether they would recommend the game is still valuable data, even if they are not able to articulate why." Honestly, I really respect that.

If you prefer the old way of doing things, you can bypass the new system entirely and keep your reviews sorted as they've always been: Select the "Display" dropdown menu in the customer reviews section on the Steam store page, and uncheck the "use new helpfulness system" box.

Steam's new 'Helpfulness System' checkbox in user review menu — (Image credit: Valve)

Voila—memes, jokes, and ASCII art will be right back where they belong.

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.