Steam Store to Overhaul Game Review Feature: Memes and Emoticons to be Deprioritized

To emphasize the display of genuine game reviews, the Steam store is making significant changes to the game pages, making it easier for users to find real game evaluations instead of scrolling through memes or emoticons.

In the Steam game reviews, there is often an abundance of emoticons, memes/jokes, or ASCII character-based mimic emoticons. While these aren't considered spam, Steam believes that genuine game evaluations are most important.

The new system that Steam is testing will change the sorting of user reviews, with the main goal being to prioritize reviews that help players make purchasing decisions.

Currently, in Steam reviews, users can mark a review as helpful, and those marked as such are sorted higher. However, the reality is that many "helpful" reviews are also memes or jokes, so relying solely on user clicks does not solve the problem.

How will Steam prioritize the display of genuinely helpful content? The answer is that Steam will use a combination of manual review, user reports, and machine learning algorithms to detect content that ranks high but is irrelevant to the actual game evaluation.

The new system will be implemented after the public beta is complete. Then, users will be able to clearly see genuine game reviews at a glance. This is also beneficial for promoting game sales. Of course, if the first few reviews of a game are negative, it's likely that this will impact the game's sales.