Valve announced that an important change is coming to the way its Steam review system works. The change revolves around separating people that have purchased a game and those that have played it for free. The two categories will get separated when it comes to reviewing time, although not entirely.
What this means is that people that check the reviews a game has gotten, will see a score that was only influenced by the reviews of paying customers. Valve’s decision comes as a result of considering that people who have paid for the game are more invested and thus their review is much more qualified to represent the community’s perception of the game.
This doesn’t mean that people who have played the game but haven’t paid for it will be just shoved into a corner and forgotten. Valve will just make it so their review scores will not impact the overall score that a game has. At all. Regardless of how good or how bad a game review might be, it won’t impact the overall score unless it has been given by someone that has paid for the game.
This change will affect everyone that has played without paying, including those that have benefited from various promotions or offers. That being said, their reviews will still be visible and people that want to see what the community thinks about a specific game will still be able to see what non-paying fans have to say. It is just the aggregate score that will remain untouched by their reviews, not the review section entirely.
Valve’s decision looks good on paper, although it will be hard to tell how the community will be influenced by this change. Often times, people that haven’t paid for a game tend to expect the most, and also complain the most about various aspects of said game, while paying customers can be more understanding of some aspects.
An attempt to make scoring or review of items better is always a good endeavor. Customers that have more skin in the game should always have more say as to the evaluation and judgement of a product. Since paying customers are more highly valued participants than those that provide less financial incentive to the producers of products then those customers have more of a right to influence the perception of said products. There needs to be better reasons not to allow paying customers not to have a valid say so until that day comes they can influence reviews more than others and that at this point is justified.