Steam reviews are everything at all times – great, awful, funny, and completely serious. It can be difficult to parse where any given reviewer is coming from, but Valve has just made it a bit easier. You can now see when a user who’s reviewed a game has also refunded that title, which should give you a bit more insight into whether that review is worth paying attention to.
A number of users across the internet have noted a “product refunded” tag on Steam reviews in the past week – here’s one example from somebody who didn’t like Doom Eternal’s cutscenes and scarce ammo. Steam’s return policy allows no-questions-asked refunds on pretty much any game you’ve spent less than two hours with, so the system can be easy to abuse.
Steam’s generous review policy has occasionally allowed additional users to jump into review bombing campaigns, and a clear identifier of refunded reviews would make it easier to tell when that’s happening. We asked Valve if that was part of the reasoning behind the added feature, but the company simply says “we just felt it was another valuable piece of data for customers when reading reviews.”
The Steam store has gotten another major update this week, as Steam Labs’ Interactive Recommender is now live. In theory, the update will more smartly recommend games based on machine learning algorithms, and it gives you some options to bias the recommendations toward more niche titles or popular games.
Check out some free Steam games if you’re looking for something to play this weekend – you definitely won’t need to refund them.