Reviewing Steam reviews...

I'm going to pick on Steam again...

On November 25th, 2013 Steam launched Steam Reviews.  The promise was to allow players to rate games they actually own.  Whether by purchase, gift or the family plan if you played the game you got to tell everyone on Steam about it.

Good premise.  Who else is better suited to rate a game than somebody who's spent a few hours of their lives actually playing it.  Metacritic is a go to source for many and Steam actually includes their ratings in a game's store page if available.

Of course there's nothing to stop a game publisher's shill or someone who just wants to troll a publisher from skewing the Metacritic user ratings. 

So that's a good thing.  Except like all things Steam there's a flaw.

Case in Point...

I'm a pretty big fan of the Borderlands series.  Loved the original, the sequel and just about all the DLC.  I almost can't get enough of the game.  Even with the latest trend toward DLC disease I still find myself losing hours to mowing down baddies of every persuasion.

My entire Borderlands "career" encompasses over 500 hours of gameplay including DLC packs.  I've reviewed both Borderlands games using the Steam Review utility but when it came time to review the DLC my efforts were denied.

Instead of enlightening my fellow players about the joys of "The Secret Armory of General Knox" or the "Zombie Island of Dr. Ned" I was informed that I had to have played the game for at least 5 minutes. 

Aside from the fact that at least 50 of those 500+ hours spent  in the Borderlands universe can be attributed to those 2 DLC packs I started to wonder if Valve is keeping its eye on the ball.

The Steam Cloud is supposed to synchronize your gaming activities across multiple computers but that's not guaranteed.  For instance, Bioware's Bioshock does not synchronize with the Steam cloud, Neither does Poker Night 2 and in some cases Borderlands 2. 

If you look closely at your games list on Steam you'll notice that DLC rarely shows up instead being a component of the primary game and visible only on the store page.  Still, it shows up as an available title for review under your game reviews list.  That is, if you can find your reviews.  They're buried under your profile under the "reviews" heading on the right side of the page. (see the screenshot)

I thought for a moment that the problem may be due to the fact that the game wasn't installed but quickly disproved that when I was able to review games that hadn't been installed in over a year.  I was even able to review a game that I had never played on Steam but instead had imported using the "Activate a product on Steam" option on the Games menu.

So what I'm left with is the ability to review a game I never played on Steam but a denial to review the one's I did!

Speaking of reviews, they're kind of hard to find.  If you scroll down the store page of a game you may find them but not before being subjected to promotions for DLC, 4 packs and Metacritic scores.  There is no quick and easy way to see Steam user reviews without visiting the store page. 

That kind of makes them irrelevant.  They're not so much a tool as window dressing and considering that you may be unjustly barred from reviewing a game you've actually played it makes them even less compelling.

In the end, it's ultimately just one gamer's opinion but if you're not going to take it seriously why bother to offer the functionality in the first place.  Steam had a good idea here but their execution is undermining it.

Fix it Gabe...






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