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Steam games got 300% more user reviews after the Library update

Steam now gets 70,000 user reviews a day

Steam’s big Library update has been with us for some time now, so we’ve all had a chance to get cozy with the revamped interface and new features. One of the changes, you’ve probably noted, is that Steam now asks you if you’d like to review a game you’ve spent a substantial amount of time in. That small change has tripled the amount of user reviews Steam gets every day.

“The updated library also introduced some new ways to prompt the user to review or re-review a game they have been playing based on certain criteria,” Valve says in a developer-focused blog, “which substantially increased the number of reviews written. We previously saw around 17 thousand new reviews posted per day across all games, but since the Library update, we now see 70 thousand reviews per day, for an increase of over 300%.”

That sudden increase is especially notable for indie developers, as Steam reviews have often been used as an (extremely rough) indicator of sales. It looks the ratios devs use to calculate those sales are changing substantially in light of Valve’s push for more user reviews.

The Library update also hugely emphasized Steam’s new events system, and it’s been a primary driver toward those event pages, which have been viewed in total over eight billion times.

In the full blog post, Valve also notes a few things it’s working on for 2020. Perhaps the most notable for end-users is an update to the Steam mobile app, which will “add more login types and help users secure their accounts.”