Your funny Steam reviews could get in trouble

Steam is introducing a new system to improve the “helpfulness” of user reviews on its platforms, and that could mean bad news for your sassiness and one-word jokes.

Valve released a platform update on Wednesday and, in addition to the usual patches and bug fixes, also introduced the beta version of a user rating system that is now enabled by default during testing. It attempts to rank reviews by quality by pushing up comments that help people make purchasing decisions and pushing down more facetious comments.

The company says it achieves this through a combination of user reports and machine learning, although this is still a work in progress. Some users may leave a helpful review that is only one or two words, for example, so using an algorithm isn't a perfect solution.

Get your weekly teardown of the technology behind PC games

Note that Steam isn't completely removing your ability to create memes in the reviews section. “User reviews that are deemed unhelpful to prospective customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews consisting of ASCII artwork, or reviews that are primarily gameplay memes and inside jokes, will be sorted behind other reviews on the game's store page,” reads a post explaining the change. “This doesn't mean players will never see these humorous but unhelpful posts, but it hopefully means they'll see them less often when trying to learn about a game.”

If you want to see these so-called unhelpful reviews, you can disable the setting by going to Advertisement about the user ratings for each game and turn off Use new assistance system. If you like the system, you can report the reviews displayed.

Steam is cracking down on unhelpful or irrelevant content on its platform. On Tuesday, Valve announced new rules for store page descriptions that will roll out in September that will prohibit links to other websites or games on Steam unless they're included in the relevant sections. This is intended to reduce player confusion and generally poor descriptions. These are just a few of the many changes that have been made to Steam recently, including more streamlined Steam Family features and native game recording, which is now in beta.