to the Time Played Slider

It’s so nice that Steam has added as many scalable metrics to their user reviews over the years. Like so many other quadrants of the web, Steam has been inundated with with super low effort hot takes. When perusing games there thinking about something I’d might like to play, it’s only natural I’ll see where the user reviews stand. Anything at “Positive” or above will warrant further investigation. If it’s getting pushed hard into negative territory I’ll know to avoid it or that it had a buggy launch and I should wait it out.

That being said, I’ve noticed that when I scroll to the bottom of the page and read the user reviews, there are tons that have less than an hour of play time, and still quite a few going all the way up to five hours. These are reviews I just don’t care about unless it’s a mass warning that the game had a bad launch and needs to be heavily patched. A lot of the time, though, it’s just crappy meme posting or something else of equally low quality. This is why I’m glad that there is a slider that allows me to ignore these people.

It’s funny because for years I’d see forum posts about people complaining about this or that review at a major game web site. They’d be questioning how long the writer even played the game while discussing how long a person should play a game before they’ve developed a solid enough opinion to be going around writing reviews professionally. For me, I’ve never been one to trust anything lower than 10 hours. That tends to feel like a good amount of time to kick the tires and take things for a spin, developing an informed enough opinion to share and potentially influence others. I just find it funny that after years of people raking reviewers over the coals about play time are proving to be just as bad, offering an opinion when they've barely touched the game themselves.

It’s a reason I’ve never much trusted first impressions. Ever since Total Biscuit came along with those a decade ago, and everyone started copying him, it feels like these have become more a tool for people to try and get noticed in the YouTube algorithm than a genuine early look at a game. There was probably a bit more quality in the early days of these with some useful information, but they’ve greatly diminished over the last ten years. It’s at the point now where someone may as well hop into a stream on Twitch and just watch someone play for 10-20 minutes to get an idea of the game because the impressions videos out there are so useless. Anyway, I digress.

These sliders show just how much sentiment shifts when ignoring the low quality comments (although, not always). Some games I’ve tried this on indeed have shot up from “Mostly Positive” to “Very Positive”. It’s just nice to get what I consider more well-informed opinions. It also illustrates how much negativity is polluting the web, or at least how many unpleasant people with axes to grind are out there, ever eager to ponitificate to the masses like some deranged street preacher.

Also, it’s kind of funny to use the slider on the free to play games on Steam if only because those games tend to attract some of the most rancid, objectively awful people on the internet. They’ll shit on everything, so they play these games for an hour or two then zero bomb them to feed their egos. However, all I have to do is nudge the time played slider to two hours, and most of those games that were scoring "Mixed" to “Mostly Positive” suddenly leap to “Very Positive”. It’s not that I want to play those games, but it just feels nice to have a tool that negates these awe-inspiringly unpleasant people’s opinions. They often seem to just want to have their ego fed, going around giving games a low review score, complaining about stuff, but Steam provides a tool that makes it such that they might as well not even exist. For attention-seeking trolls, this is the worst kind of fate.

On the whole, I’ve found the ways by which people can customize the criteria by which user reviews are displayed quite helpful on Steam. The big one for me is time played. My number one concern is how informed people’s opinions are. The only value a short play time zero bomb campaign has is if it warns that the game launched super buggy. For whatever reason, a lot of people seem to think it’s perfectly valid to slap up some half-assed review when they’ve only played 30 minutes, and it can shit up the aggregate score. It’s so nice to be able to filter those people out.

- Pennywhether

pennywhether@posteo.net

(April 15, 2021)