These days, games often change quite a bit over time, somebody’s experience with a title at launch may not accurately reflect the state of things a few months down the line. In keeping with that logic, Valve updated Steam this week, so that user reviews now prioritise more recent opinions over older ones.

Steam’s new user review system will give better exposure to reviews written within the last 30 days. This also generates a second review score for games, so while an overall score might be ‘mostly positive’ reviews from the last 30 days may class it as ‘overwhelmingly positive’.

In the recent review section, those classed as helpful will appear first, as Valve’s blog post explains: “While there are plenty of new reviews posted every day, we saw that it was often difficult for newer reviews to be seen and voted on enough to become listed as most helpful. As a result, the most helpful reviews presented on a store page would often describe an outdated view of a game that might have changed dramatically over the course of Early Access or post-release development. By listing recently posted reviews more prominently and by defaulting to recent helpful reviews, Steam can now show a more current idea of what it’s like to play the game now.”

Aside from that, other changes Valve has made include a new ‘Summary’ tab in the review section, a new check box when writing a review that allows you to disclose if you received the game for free or not and there is an option to see reviews of all languages.

KitGuru Says: This seems like a good change to make, particularly for early access games as those can change quite drastically over time.

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