Valve Reveals Plan to Fight Steam Review Bombing

Effective today.

By Alex Osborn

In an effort to combat review bombing on Steam, Valve has updated how review data of a game is shown to potential purchasers.

Since review bombing occurs when players post mass number of negative reviews in a short window of time, effective today, "each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game," Valve explained in a post on the official Steam Blog.

Grand Theft Auto V review graph, via Steam

Users can then click on any portion of the graph to see a selection of reviews from that particular period of time, making it easy for potential purchasers to look at the review data and clearly find "distortions in the reviews," which indicate where review bombing has occurred.

While this solution requires a bit of extra work on the part of the consumer, Valve opted to approach review bombing in this way so as not to ever prevent a Steam user from being able to submit a review.

In other Steam news, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds set new record this past weekend with the highest number of concurrent players for any game ever on Steam, and earlier this month, the Malaysian government blocked the entire Steam Store because of a new addition to the indie fighting game Fight of Gods.

Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @alexcosborn.

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