Steam has announced they’re taking action in what they call “joke reviews” by resorting how their comments appear. Many of these reviews feature ASCII art and meme art, and one-word posts.
“One-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes” are now considered by Valve to be unhelpful, and will be sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page by default.
Because Valve determined the current system of voting for an “unhelpful” review to be ineffective, the company has installed a new ‘helpfulness system’ that curates posts by their “helpfulness” and puts more detailed and informative reviews on top.
Humorous or ASCII post will still be seen by sorting the posts by date. According to the Steam FAQ, positive and negative reviews are not affected.
Also coming with the changes are new rules for the Steam store, which no longer permit vendors to include links in their descriptions. The changes will be implemented in September.
Valve claims that many of the images with links in game descriptions of several games were actually redirecting to other games, so the store has now officially declared a ban on this practice.
Valve also said it wants to encourage game developers that use “prologues” to use it for playable demos instead. The new changes also prohibits buttons mimicking Steam’s store user interfaces, or buttons.
Valve said the changes will prevent players from being confused at a Steam page while reviewing or buying a game.
