Steam User Reviews

About

Steam User Reviews are tongue-in-cheek customer reviews of various video games titles that are available for purchase on Valve’s online marketplace platform Steam, in a very similar vein to the facetious reviews that are posted by users on Amazon and eBay.

Origin

In late 2013, Valve introduced a user ratings and review system on Steam, allowing users to rate and write reviews of any video game titles they have purchased on their product pages. Within the first fe weeks, multiple satirical reviews were written for universally-panned titles, including Bad Rats^[11](shown below, left) and Infestation: Survivor Stories^[12] (shown below, right).

Spread

After the release of this feature, more tongue-in-cheek reviews continued to surface for a wider range of titles, including AAA popular releases as well as controversial games. With the increase in popularity of the reviews, a number of video game review sites like Kotaku^[2] and PC Gamer^[4] soon caught on with the joke and published facetious reviews of video games based on user feedback found on Steam. On January 14th, 2014, a link to a compilation of humorous Dota 2 reviews was posted to the /Dota2 subreddit^[5], where it gathered 1,001 upvotes and 169 comments prior to archival. In late December 2013, a Tumblr blog titled Steam-Reviews^[6] was made, as well as another one titled quality steam reviews^[7] in late June 2014, both compiling a series of funny steam reviews taking from a variety of games.

On January 25th, 2014, a discussion on the Steam subreddit r/Steam^[10] was posted discussing whether or not Steam Joke Reviews were funny or were hindering the ability to get actual information on the game from real reviews. On January 14th, 2015, Valve added a “funny” button alongside the upvote and downvote button on Steam reviews to acknowledge the use of the reviews for satire.^[8]