… the ability to continually comment on other people’s Steam reviews.
I think by default the option is disabled, but it’s just excellent that it offers such a feature at all. You can’t even do this in Google Maps, Google Play, Walmart, Amazon, or Target, or almost any other platform. But on Steam, unlike GOG, Itch, or other platforms of which I know, you can have an entire conversation with the reviewer about the validity or details concerning their review, where you can flesh out, “Hey, this person actually has no idea of what they’re talking about,” or, “Hmm, this is actually a valid point that I hadn’t considered before,” and even defend the reviewer from other critics in the comments.
I still get concerned about Steam’s incredible dominion over digital games today, but it also blows my mind why other platforms don’t try to copy even just some of its elements more.
Other platforms don’t copy features like that because community isn’t part of their value. Steam has chat, availability indicators, badges, forums, curator lists and in that lens comments on reviews make sense. I don’t use these features much but they’re there.
I don’t think Nintendo, Epic, Microsoft, Google, Apple trust their customers enough to let them talk to each other. It’s a lot of work to manage, too. They just want to be more like a b&m store, where they control the presentation as much as possible.
Anyone who’s looked at Steam forums lately might see a good argument for not having them, because the average person there sucks. It’s a shame, because it’s often one of the few places you can get a direct response from the developers, but you need to wade through people complaining about woke and demanding refunds because the online population died off like they all do.
Steam Forums is genuinely one of the worst social media platforms on the internet. It pains me how much Valve has allowed the alt-right to incubate and spread propaganda there.
Worse, they’re also quite prominent in Valve game communities (TF2/DOTA2) as well, so they’re poisoning in-game interactions, too.
It’s like the GoonSwarm of Eve Online. Fucking griefers and bullies, that or conservative/religious scum.
I mean nintendo had flipnote… Which shut down because of child predators. They are fully aware of what happens when you have community chat.
Only haters or apologists there. It’s a nut house of extremists.
I don’t understand why people can’t objectively complain or praise something without succumbing to “do you know how hard it is to make a game?”, or “this Dev sucks and I’m never buying another game from them”.
I agree. The last time i looked at the Steam forums it was pretty bad. Comically stupid posts which i only know as over the top satire from other places.
But tbh they always sucked. Sure, there werent constant “this game is woke because it contains women/poc” posts >10 years ago. But otherwise it was always a cesspit for really stupid and awful people. Maybe its really worse than before but the bar was already so fucking low.
It’s unfortunately very possible harmful orgs like tankies, the Taliban, and far-right incel groups got some of their start by recruiting on less-moderated forums like Steam. People who dive the depths find some terrible stuff.