As some of you already know, Steam now only recommends games to others if they have high user review scores.
Stardock hasn't really done much to mobilize its community to go review its games. Hence, games with 1/10th our sales numbers will often have twice as many reviews as our games (all positive of course).
In the past, I've made some mention that we'd love to see our community be more active in reviewing our games (even if they're negative, as least they're people who are from the community and not someone who just loaded up the game for 5 minutes and found it "boring" or "hard").
This is an issue you're going to probably see a lot wider coverage of in the coming months as the difference between a game with a Mixed review score versus a Very Positive review score, regardless of the quality of the game itself, can be a factor of 100X in terms of page impressions.
Worse, the review score system had its rules changed such that our best players, who bought Lifetime Founders editions don't even get their votes counted which has a pretty significant affect on our relative review score versus publishers who not only have the ability to mobilize thousands of players to go review never had a Founder's like program.
We at Stardock would really appreciate it if you haven't already reviewed GalCiv III on Steam to take a moment and do so.
Review GalCiv III here
Review GalCiv III: Crusade
As they say on YouTube, please like and subscribe.
WHAT! Is there any logic to this? Seems unfair
The whole system is ridiculous imo. It's all about who can buy the best botnet or, at the very least, mobilize their fans to flood the voting system.
When you see a game with say >5% of its user base (via Steamspy) having reviewed the game AND it has a high review score, eye brows should be raised.
And none of that gaming of the system bugged me until the flood of titles came in and effectively made our titles invisible on Steam.
For fun, try this:
Go onto Steam right now, go to the search field and type Galactic. See what it suggests. Galactic Civilizations doesn't even show up. Why? Because its Steam review score is only 71%. And why is that? Because only a tiny % of our user base reviews and they're mostly people who barely know the game.
that's silly...
I would have preferred to write a review in French, my English writing skills aren't exactly... literrary, but it'll do, I guess. Don't get why there's an option to write in Bulgarian but not in French on Steam. Anyway. Done, for the main game. I'll review Crusade once I have had time to play it.
woaa. That seems recent though, because I remember searching for DLCs a while back, and it would pop up in the first titles when searching. That sucks
Since I already wrote a (positive) review for GalCiv III, I do not see a way to review Crusade on the Steam pages (despite finding it a better game, overall). This does seem like an unfair way for Steam to promote games.
EDIT - nevermind, I found a means to review the expansion separately, and am now doing so.
I've never reviewed a thing with Steam, but did so a couple of weeks ago. That's how much I like and appreciate Crusade! (Please deposit funds to the usual account... )
That last part is a joke for those who are humor challenged!
Thanks for the tip. I thought we couldn't do that. Review posted. Whether Steam counts it or not.
OK. I posted a review on Steam for GC3 about a year ago. I just did one for Crusade. But I can't tell if it accepted. Since I bought the Founder Elite package during GC3's EA and
Thanks guys. The score is now back over Mostly Positive which, in turn, increases the number of page views to the game by a huge number.
Fundamentally, the system is broken. During the darker moments, it's tempting to just build a review bot and player bot and just have a 91% positive review score with 14,000 concurrent users. But then there is no way to tell if people really like the game or not.
The basic issue now is that when only 0.6% of the users vote and the entire game's visibility can be decided, literally by a half dozen reviews, sometimes by people who have hundreds of hours into the game but are essentially using the review system to hold the game hostage until THEIR particular pet peeve is solved then you know the system is flawed.
We run a site called WinCustomize.com so we have a lot of experience with the power of user reviews. But we would never consider using a handful of user reviews to determine visibility. That's nuts. It's so prone to abuse.
I don't envy Valve and the position they're in. It's a tough issue to solve. But since they do take 30% of the pie, it seems like there would be more than sufficient resources to solve it. Fix the exploits and have visibility based on things like what are people actually playing.
Strange, I have no problem writing reviews in french. In the menu, languages are sorted by english alphabetical order, so french is just under english and finnish.
I think people let Valve off the hook way too easily. Their platform has some long running flaws that they should get called out on. While things have improved somewhat, there's still visibility issues with the store-front, and the platform is being gamed by unscrupulous 'developers' looking to make a quick buck with their shit-house 'games'.
weird, I couldn't see it at all, only an handful languages. Did you use the Steam app or the website?
Froggy, I assume your plugged in with the Steam crew, what do they say is their justification for this? Should we all vote with our $ and start buying from GOG?
I had only previously reviewed Crusade, just went and did my 2nd Steam review for GC3. So this lazy SOB finally got off his a$$ to share his opinion. Hope it helps!
I use the app. Specifically, I go to the Store page of the game I wish to review.
They say they are aware of the problem.
My reviews of this game will go on GOG and be very positive.
p.s. I just remembered I have the Steam version of the game too, so I guess I`ll just copy and paste it there, but no doubt someone will call me a shill because it`ll look like I`ve played the game less than 5 minutes.
GalCiv and Ashes getting close.
Funny I thought video game creating eggheads would figure out how to create an effective and fair review system. Can I have their jobs? I will work for 80% pay.
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