Steam is continuing to refresh its customer review system with a small but potentially impactful new feature. Reviews will now note if the user had primarily played the game on the Steam Deck.
Valve announced the update on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday, showcasing a new Steam Deck icon that appears in the top right of a Steam review, next to the star icon that mentions a player played the game on Steam and, therefore, their thoughts will be counted in the overall score. Seems like an appropriate place to put it.
Good morning! We’ve just shipped a new feature on Steam that shows when a customer review was written by someone who played primarily on Steam Deck. Keep an eye out for the Deck icon to see how these players reviewed the game, and let us know what you think! pic.twitter.com/RYVa9wVGYi
— Steam Deck (@OnDeck) August 22, 2024
This might not seem like a big deal, but the gaming experience can vary wildly between your regular ol’ PC and the Steam Deck. There’s a reason why the Steam Deck verification system exists, after all. Some games just haven’t been optimized for it and controllers, and while users can do a lot of heavy lifting to get games to work, it’s often not a complete solution. Despite Steam Deck verification, a game also just might not be pleasant to play on the handheld console (looking at you, Baldur’s Gate 3).
Steam has been working on its review system for years, but has been implementing some changes lately to make top reviews more useful. It began testing a new system that would improve the “helpfulness” of user reviews by pushing ones that just have jokes or ASCII art down through user reporting and machine learning.
Valve also recently updated the platform to improve demo discoverability and the information on Steam store pages by removing links to third-party websites in the description.
