Steam and low ratings on games

[Raptor With a Saber]

So i've noticed recently that on a few games the rating system for them you know the thing that says Postive,Overwhelming positive or Neg and Really Neg don't show Negative or overwhelmingly negative anymore. Are the rating controlled by the game Devs allowing them to turn off the overall rating of the game? Or has it always been like that?

[Deleted]

Don't think devs can moderate reviews, that would defeat the purpose. then again devs have carte blanche to delete and ban all negativity on the steam forums.

one assumes they can make fake accounts though if they were so inclined.

It also depends on how long after release it's been (more likely to positive reviews if you got it on sale for 5 bucks), wether early access reviews get updated, and wether the dev has butthurt people/overhyped.

[Mormolyce]

I honestly never noticed it had a ratings section.

[Deleted]

I honestly never noticed it had a ratings section.

it's a fairly recent addition.

[Heathy]

I think they have disabled the reviews entirely each game i check i get 'There are no public reviews for this product in your language'

the negativity was starting to have an effect me thinks.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Edit: Okay, restarted steam and all the reviews are back in their proper places.

[Gdcotton]

Okay this actually pisses me off, there are several games I did NOT or DID buy because of reading reviews due to just small issues, such as they wont function or work for some reason anymore...such as fallout 3 and fallout 3 new vegas having some problems. Steam is bout to piss off a LOT of people.

[sultangurde]

Okay this actually pisses me off, there are several games I did NOT or DID buy because of reading reviews due to just small issues, such as they wont function or work for some reason anymore...such as fallout 3 and fallout 3 new vegas having some problems. Steam is bout to piss off a LOT of people.

They disabled Witcher 3 comments, as people flamed CDPR for releasing shit and not optimised game.

[Gdcotton]

They disabled Witcher 3 comments, as people flamed CDPR for releasing shit and not optimised game.

Any game I look at right now has 0 reviews available though.

[sultangurde]

Any game I look at right now has 0 reviews available though.

Oh. That is even worse.

[Tekkommo]

It was fine yesterday, appears to have been disabled today.

I'm fairly sure it's happened before, sure it will be back to normal in a day or 2.

[Deleted]

I was looking at a few games yesterday and a good half of them had negative or very negative feedback.

[Raptor With a Saber]

Witch 3/

Witcher 3 No Overall rating in basic description on the top right.

Watch Dogs

Same no Over all rating near basic description boxes.


I noticed it first started with all the games that had Mixed,Mostly Negative labels.

Now not even games that have always had great reviews or Mostly/Overwhelmingly positive scores have them

Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind

[zealo]

Witch 3/

Witcher 3 No Overall rating in basic description on the top right.

Watch Dogs

Same no Over all rating near basic description boxes.


I noticed it first started with all the games that had Mixed,Mostly Negative labels.

Now not even games that have always had great reviews or Mostly/Overwhelmingly positive scores have them

Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind

Notice how the reviews are gone as well near the bottom of the page, I suspect this is a steam issue more so than ratings being removed.

[Raptor With a Saber]

I hope so because the only good reviews are those actually from the players and not the Generic Copy paste ones they place all around the pages.

[nôrps]

I went and looked, and I can't seem to find any rating anymore, positive or negative or mixed. That is disappointing. Lately I've been burned by so many developers that I have set a rule to myself to only buy games from steam with a very positive rating or better.

No explanation or anything...just gone.

[Saft]

Last I checked TW3 had 86% with almost 3k scorers so I doubt they're trying to fool people into a blind purchase.

This has also happened several times before when I've checked games out. No score or 'reviews' are available for some time which I thought was strange but it's probably one of a million issues Steam has.

[Gumboy]

Okay this actually pisses me off, there are several games I did NOT or DID buy because of reading reviews due to just small issues, such as they wont function or work for some reason anymore...such as fallout 3 and fallout 3 new vegas having some problems. Steam is bout to piss off a LOT of people.

You didn't buy two amazing games because of some slight technicql issues that a very small number deal with and are incredibly easy to fix?

I don't think you would have survived gaming in the early 2000s lol.

[Kelimbror]

The review are all on there for me and it's a system that's been there for some time. If you don't see it, probably just a bug. In any case, you have to look at the actual content of the reviews and should only use the default 'Mostly Positive" or "Mixed" etc as a wide measuring stick. It's highly likely that games getting mixed or lower aren't well made games, but it doesn't mean they aren't fun games.

Even getting beyond that, you have to look at the specifics of the text reviews to determine whether you can trust the general author base of reviews. For example, GTAV is flooded with people raging about getting banned for using mods in multiplayer like idiots. If you just glance, you see page after page of thumbs down and negative reviews, but they amount to nothing.

[Edge-]

Are you talking about metacritic scores or the user scores?

The user scores ("overwhelming positive"/"mixed"/etc.) are still there for all games, devs can't control that (nor the reviews from users IIRC). But for metacritic scores, devs can choose to toggle that on or off for their games pages.