Before putting down hard-earned money towards a new video game, we’re sure that there are many gamers out there who would prefer to check out a review first before deciding whether or not to purchase it. However sometimes due to issues like review bombing, it can unfairly affect a game’s success.This is an issue that platforms like Yelp have experienced where people unhappy with a restaurant due to other non-food related factors can leave negative reviews and unfairly impact its rating, but this is a problem that Valve wants to avoid with Steam reviews which is why the company is introducing a histogram to its review section.
According to Valve, “Starting today, each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game, and by clicking on any part of the histogram you’re able to read a sample of the reviews from that time period. As a potential purchaser, it’s easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it’s something you care about.”
Basically gamers get to see the reviews of a game over a period of time, where a sudden spike in negativity could be an anomaly for a game that has received positive reviews most of the time. It is an interesting solution and one that could work, but we guess we’ll have to give it time to see if it does.
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