Valve launches community-driven Steam Reviews

Steam users can now rate, recommend and review the titles they've played through the Steam Community. Steam Reviews, launched today in beta, lets the community write reviews in the language of their choice, rate each other's reviews and leave comments on those reviews.

Valve will permit reviews of titles you've played on Steam — even if you haven't purchased the game — and will display Steam Reviews data alongside Metacritic scores. Valve says it's looking into generating a score based on Steam Reviews, but not until it evaluates data from user reviews.

"Many products on Steam change significantly over time as the game or software is updated and new content is added," reads a FAQ on Steam Reviews. "In order to form a score that accurately reflects the current state of a product, we first need to gather and evaluate the data from reviews."

Steam users will be able to flag "abusive reviews" and developers will have the option to respond to Steam Reviews, with their responses flagged as coming from a developer. Steam Reviews are visible from each game's community hub.

In a release, Valve called Steam Reviews "an evolution of the Recommendation system that has been a part of Steam since 2010." Steam users have submitted more than 7 million Recommendations, Valve says, and users can now opt to make past Recommendations visible as Steam Reviews to others.