Over this past weekend, many Steam users flocked to social media in an attempt to get Valve to change some of its game review policies, specifically those surrounding users not being able to submit reviews for games that are in Early Access or Pre-Relese with many of those users using Starfield and Remnant 2 as examples.
This outcry comes after Starfield entered Early Access on Friday. While early reviews of the game have been mostly positive, user-generated reviews on Steam will only go live when the game fully releases on the 6th of September.
On Reddit, two threads popped up focusing on Steam reviews. Both of these threads point out that despite not being fully released until the 6th, Starfield is already wildly popular on Steam with over 222 thousand concurrent players. Still, the review section is entirely barren outside of curator reviews.
Steam should allow user reviews on pre-release early access games.
by u/DarrenMacNally in Steam
The common conciseness among those participating in these threads is that Valve doesn’t want users to review early-access games due to the potential of those reviews negatively affecting sales and Steam rankings ahead of release.
However, as pointed out multiple times, Steam could stop this by only allowing players who have pre-purchased a game in early access to leave reviews.
Many of those commenting also brought up the need for Steam to further refine the terms it uses as there are games, such as Baldur’s Gate 3, that were listed as early access for over three years before its full release and in all that time, users were unable to review the game on the platform.
What are your thoughts on this, if any? Let us know in the comments.