Since Valve Corp introduced a user review system to Steam, a “Mixed” or lower review score has essentially become a death sentence for many games sold on the platform, but now game developers may get a second chance if they improve their games, as Steam will now focus on more recent reviews to reflect the current status of a game.

The issue with the way Steam has handled user reviews in the past is that it often punished developers for early mistakes, making it extremely difficult for their games to be successful later on even after all of their issues have been resolved.

This problem was pointed out last year by Paul Johnson, co-founder of indie studio Rubicon Development, who noted that while Apple’s App Store shows reviews from the most recent build of a game, Steam shows an aggregate score from the game’s entire history.

According to Johnson, that meant that even after Rubicon made major improvements to a game that had a rocky start, it still had a difficult time recovering from its early troubles.

“We listened to our complaints, fixed all the issues and represented our game to the world anew,” Johnson said in a blog post at the time. “Since then, we’ve had nothing but positive feedback from the small numbers of players we do pick up. But our ‘score’ is still based heavily on a version so old now that nobody can even remember it, and it’s still doing damage.”

Steam’s new system

Going forward, Steam will now show recent reviews by default rather than showing the most popular reviews of all time, which tend to come from shortly after a game’s release. Valve said that it hopes that this change will give users a better idea of the current game experience rather than the experience from when it was first launched.

Valve will also be changing up the way it handles the overall user review score, which ranges from the abysmal “Overwhelmingly Negative” to the highly sought after “Overwhelmingly Positive.”

“For [the user] review score, we’d previously only been compiling an overall score using a simple calculation of the percentage of all reviews that were positive,” Valve explained in a blog post. “This let us be really transparent in how the score was being calculated, but didn’t accommodate cases when a game has changed a lot (for better or worse) over time.”

“To address that, we’ve now added a Recent review score that calculates the positive percentage of reviews within the past 30 days (as long as there are enough reviews posted within those 30 days and as long as the game has been available on Steam for at least 45 days). The overall score is still present as well in case you still find that information helpful.”

This will be a welcome change for developers like Rubicon, and it will likely give many games a second chance at success. This should also be good news for Steam users, as it could encourage developers to actually fix their games in the hopes of getting more sales down the road.

Image courtesy of Valve Corp