You’ve been there. I know you have. Staring at a Steam store page, your mouse hovering over the big green "Add to Cart" button. Your eyes flicker down. Not to the screenshots, not to the developer’s carefully crafted marketing copy. You look at the magic words: “Mostly Positive.”
Hmm. Mostly. That’s a loaded word, isn’t it? It’s not a ringing endorsement. It’s a B-minus on a report card. It’s the sound of a thousand people shrugging and saying, “Yeah, it’s… fine.” You pause. You dig into the reviews. You start the strange, modern ritual of trying to quantify fun by committee.
We put an almost absurd amount of faith in that little percentage, that aggregated opinion of the masses. And for years, we’ve assumed it was a relatively pure number. A raw reflection of what people who bought and played the game actually thought. But here’s the thing. It wasn’t always that clean. And that’s why Steam makes a big change to how review scores are calculated, a tweak that sent some pretty significant ripples through the PC gaming world.
And honestly? I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
The Ghost in the Machine: Why This Was Even a Problem
Let's be real for a second. The internet is a place where people will do anything to game a system. Anything. In the world of Steam, this meant that the review score—that sacred metric of quality—was vulnerable.
Imagine you're a developer with a, let's say, less than stellar game. What do you do? You could spend months fixing it. Or… you could generate ten thousand Steam keys for your game (which costs you nothing) and hand them out to bot farms or pay-for-review services. Suddenly, your "Overwhelmingly Negative" game gets a flood of short, generic, positive reviews. The needle moves. Your game crawls out of the digital bargain bin and onto the front page, tricking unsuspecting buyers.
It’s ballot-stuffing for video games. It poisons the well for everyone. When you can’t trust the score, the whole system starts to crumble. Valve, for its part, saw this happening. They saw how a few bad actors could manipulate a system that millions of people rely on. It’s a problem that affects not just big blockbuster action titles, but the entire ecosystem.
So, they decided to bring down the hammer. But it wasn’t the kind of hammer you might expect.
The Nitty-Gritty of How Steam Makes A Big Change To Review Scores
Okay, let me try to explain this as clearly as I can, because the nuance is everything.
The change Valve implemented is both incredibly simple and deceptively complex in its implications. Here it is: From now on, reviews from users who activated a game via a product key will no longer be factored into the overall review score percentage.
Wait. Let me re-read that. Okay. So, if you get a game key from a developer, a friend, a Humble Bundle, or even from a Kickstarter campaign you backed… and you write a review, your words will still be there. People can still read your 2,000-word dissertation on the game's brilliant fishing minigame. It will be visible on the store page. But it will have absolutely zero impact on that "Mostly Positive" or "Overwhelmingly Negative" score.
Your vote, in the grand scheme of the score, doesn’t count. Only reviews from accounts that purchased the game directly through the Steam store will move the needle. Think of it this way: Valve essentially created two classes of reviewers—the "Steam Direct Purchasers" and "Everyone Else." Only the former group gets a say in the final grade.
My first reaction was, "Brilliant! That kills the bot farms dead." And it does. You can't stuff the ballot box with free keys anymore. Problem solved, right?
Well…
Good Intentions, Weird Outcomes
This is where it gets messy. Because while this change absolutely neuters the most blatant forms of review manipulation, it also creates a ton of collateral damage. A whole bunch of legitimate voices just got silenced, statistically speaking.
Think about Kickstarter backers. These are often a game’s most passionate, earliest supporters. They put their money down years in advance, based on nothing but a promise. They get a Steam key as their reward when the game finally launches. Now, their reviews—arguably some of the most informed and invested opinions out there—don't count toward the score.
What about journalists and YouTubers? They get review keys to provide early coverage. Their expert (or at least professional) opinions are now excluded from the aggregate. The same goes for anyone who picked up a game in a charity bundle or as a gift.
And it puts indie developers in a really weird spot. Sending out keys to streamers is one of the most powerful marketing tools they have. It’s how games get discovered. It’s why you might hear about a game like the one from the PUBG creator's new studio in the first place. Now, the positive buzz generated by that community doesn’t get reflected in the most important metric on the store page. It feels like a solution that, in its attempt to be surgically precise, ended up using a sledgehammer.
It’s a trade-off, and I keep coming back to that. Valve traded one kind of problem for another. They prioritized stopping outright fraud over capturing the nuance of a game's community. Maybe they had to. Maybe the data showed that the key-based review fraud was so rampant that this was the only way. But it still leaves a strange taste in my mouth, knowing that some of the most important voices are now just shouting into the void, at least as far as that all-powerful percentage is concerned.
Your Questions About Steam's Review Score Shake-Up, Answered
Wait, so my review from a Kickstarter game is worthless now?
Not worthless, just… different. Your written review is still 100% visible on the store page for everyone to read. People can still upvote it and find it helpful. It just won't be included in the math that generates the overall percentage score (e.g., "92% of reviews are positive"). Your voice is heard, but it doesn't get a vote, so to speak.
Why can I still see reviews that don't count toward the score?
Valve believes in transparency. They don’t want to censor opinions. The goal wasn’t to remove reviews, but to ensure the score itself is more trustworthy and resistant to manipulation. Keeping the reviews visible allows you to still get a wide range of opinions, even if you have to do a little more digging yourself.
How can I tell if a review is counting towards the score or not?
It's pretty easy to spot. Reviews from users who bought the game directly on Steam will have a "Verified Purchaser" tag. The ones activated by a key will not, and they often have a little blue box noting that they don't contribute to the rating. It's a small but important distinction.
So what's the main takeaway from how Steam makes a big change to how review scores are calculated?
The biggest takeaway is that Valve is prioritizing the financial transaction as a sign of a "legitimate" opinion for the purposes of the score. They're trying to create a high-confidence metric by filtering out reviews that could be easily faked. It's a blunt but effective way to fight review bombing and manipulation from free keys.
In the end, I'm left watching this grand experiment unfold. The Steam review score was never a perfect system—it was always just a rough guide, a conversation starter. Now, Valve has stepped in to be a stricter moderator of that conversation. They've made the number more resistant to outright lies, but perhaps a little less representative of the full, chaotic, passionate spectrum of the community. It’s a cleaner, more sterile number now. Whether it’s a better one… well, I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the reviews say. And, more importantly, who gets to write them. Just one more interesting wrinkle in the world of PC gaming, not unlike the simple, addictive fun you can find on sites like CrazyGames.
