New Steam ‘Helpfulness’ system cuts out joke user reviews—if you want to

If you’ve ever tipped your toes into the user review section of the largest PC game storefront, Steam, you must have come across a barrage of memes, ASCII art, and jokey copypastas. That will be the case no longer as Valve brings a ‘Helpfulness’ system to prioritize showing actual informative reviews.

Shipped as a Steam client update on Wednesday, Aug. 14, this new Helpfulness system will be on by default for every Steam user—unless, of course, one wants to dip into the memey side of Steam and keep the tradition alive.

“We’ve seen 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’s blog on the update read. “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.”

While the previous system was solely based on the number of ‘helpful’ votes given to each review, the new one will take into account informative quality of a user review with the help of two more weighing scales—the inputs from the Steam mod team and “machine learning algorithms.” The latter is to “help scale the human judgement calls.”

As someone who trudges through a bunch of games regularly on Steam, I welcome this change with open arms. But, I commend Valve for keeping the old system in place in case I want to take a look at the inside jokes of a particular game.

On a related note, user review scores are staying the same. “This change doesn’t impact how review scores are generated for each game,” Valve explained. “It’s simply changing the order that reviews appear on each store page.”