Steam User Review System Changes A Little Bit

Last September, Valve made some adjustments to how the review score for paid games was calculated. They added a bunch of sort options, two different review scores -- one recent and an overall one -- and removed reviews from activated games from consideration. Their logic was that games that were not bought shouldn't have score-meaningful reviews, to prevent abusing the system.

Today, they made a couple of more small tweaks and kept running firmly in the same direction -- from this week onwards, games will no longer include reviews by users that received the game for free, such as via a gift or during a free weekend. Free or free-to-play games still utilise reviews from all users to calculate their review score.

Whilst they hope the changes improve the relevance of the score by better reflecting the sentiment expressed by invested, paying customers, such a drastic curbing of all non paid copies seems a bit drastic. People can still buy a game, refund it, and leave a crappy review, and there is loads of gifted copies that provide meaningful feedback, be it positive or negative. Maybe a time-based limit to write a review would be a better option; after all, we journalists don't review games in 30 minutes, you know.

Let us know what you think in the comments below.