This is the most idiotic thing I have heard.http://store.steampowered.com/news/24155/
This actually makes a great deal of sense. People are stupid, generally speaking.
AMD gave tons of Ashes copies away with their hardware, and many of those owners got on steam and bitched the game out, primarily because it wasn't their cup of tea. These probable non-customers, who aren't likely to enjoy a particular game in the first place due to the simple statistical realities of personal preference in regards to entertainment, skew the practical reality of a review average. It knocked around 10 percent off the score if I remember right. The only decent game I've ever gotten with hardware was Shogun 2, everything else was something I had little to no interest in, and a few of them were extremely popular games.
When you're going to buy a game, you don't care what everyone's opinion is on the game, it's meaningless. I'd say the best visual novel ever made is retarded shit and people should go read a real book instead(or watch porn, depending on the content), but I'd never actually buy one because I don't like them. Someone that does like them, because they have severe brain damage and enjoy such silly things, wants to hear from other people that like them, not me. I'm just the asshole insulting them, not someone giving a valid opinion on whether the game is a good representation of it's concept.
People are also being "paid" for reviews, by being gifted a steam key from the producers, which may or may not result in accurate reviews, and might just be score padding at release. Unlike an actual reviewer, where the content of their review results in their reputation taking a hit if they're a shill for the company, Steam's review system is almost entirely a function of the aggregate and such deceptions remain largely unnoticed and impractical to account for.
Steam reviews are essentially Metacritic reviews - no one should take them very seriously from the get-go. I understand devs unfortunately have to because discoverability is tied to it. Steam should at least filter out less than 2 hours played by default as well imo.
I understand that steam only wants reviews from their customers. Just remember stardock with galactic civilizations three offered the founder elite package over a year before steam got early access. If you don't mind waiting for a game.
They explained why they were doing this in the previous paragraph that wasn't quoted and psychoak pretty much covered it.
It's not just about restricting reviews to 'Steam Customers Only!' Valve thinks that unscrupulous developers are gaming the reviews by giving away steam keys to enthusiastic fans (or friends and family or other well-wishers) and padding the reviews and considering the endless tide of 'indie' dross (and yeah, anime high-school drama storybooks) coursing through their marketplace grasping for some sort of relevance and some of the stories I've heard and witnessed, I can believe it. It'd be better, of course, if they weren't throwing the legitimate-outside-customer-baby out with the bathwater but until they can separate actual purchased keys from giveaway padding, they probably feel that the benefit outweighs the loss.
I agree that potential buyers should take Steam reviews (or any user reviews that gripe or shower praise without any detail, really) with a grain of salt but as far as hours go, Steam only gives people two hours to form an opinion about whether they like a game enough to keep it and I think people who opt to return are well within their rights to include what they thought about it in the tally. If they weren't having fun, they weren't having fun and them saying "It's slow, not happy with the unit variety" is at least as useful as someone with 50+ hours saying "Love it! Best strategy!" It'd certainly be nice if the minimum window were longer but for now, customers have to play by Valve's rules.
I do prefer to steam just let people who really played enough a game to review it. lets say 50+hours of game-play before reviewing it.
That I think will be much better.
What about all the people that spent countless hours with the game (who know the game the best), just because they bought it from some place other that steam, that makes them irrelevant to the score, when it is the exact opposite that should happen!
Remember all those times that Stardock was telling people to do reviews to up the score? Well, now, they can't do squat, unless those people actually bought it on steam.
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