How many times have you left a game review on Steam? There are many Steam users who still find breaking the ice and writing their first review a bit challenging or awkward, but that one review you shied away from writing may be exactly what an indie developer needed for their game to finally take the spotlight.
A conversation on this exact topic was recently initiated by Japanese independent game engine developer dolphilia (@dolphilia_ on X) who posted that they had never written a Steam review before, and that they find writing critique of another person’s work an emotionally demanding task.
Apparently, only one in around 30-50 players leave a Steam review, and that ratio is correlated with the game’s selling price and time passed since release, with newer and more expensive games getting more reviews (related article). While there are many different reasons why the number of reviews per player is so low, many of those players may be facing problems similar to what dolphilia has expressed in their post. However, many game developers have responded to the post with words of encouragement.
For example, Daisessen, who published Lethal Application quoted the original post saying that even a few words would suffice – reviews help make the game more visible to a wider audience, and each review counts. According to their post, your game can garner quadruple the views if it has ten or more reviews.
X user SparkWingGames, who’s developing the game Slot & Dungeons, seconded the post by saying that even writing a review as simple as “gg“ could help increase a game’s visibility.
MYU, who is developing Type-NOISE: Shonen Shojo DEMO, encouraged their audience to post a simple kaomoji in their reviews (d(≧▽≦)GOOD!) as a way of showing support.
According to a video marketing consultant’s post on X, the first 10 reviews on Steam are the most vital for your game to gain visibility and reach a wider audience. In order for Steam to filter out the mass produced low-quality shovelware from the discovery page, a threshold of 10 reviews was set up – which means that a game that doesn’t reach the required 10 reviews, regardless of whether they are positive or negative, will not be appearing on anyone’s discovery page until its number of reviews pass the threshold.
The existence of such a review threshold can also be confirmed by looking at the official information on Steam. If you hover your cursor over indie games and DLCs that currently have less than 10 reviews, you’ll get a message that the game needs more user reviews to generate a score. Additionally, on the Steamworks documentation page for developers, it is stated that as long as the game’s review score is Mixed or above (40%+), it will not impact its algorithmic visibility, however, if the review score drops below the 40%, the game is less likely to be featured.
In other words, if your game does not garner at least 10 reviews, a review score won’t be generated, which means that the likeliness of the game being visible to a wider audience also drops. Note that the reviews of players who got their game via Steam key will not be counted in generating a review score – your reviews count if you officially purchased the game.
However, the number of reviews does not just affect the algorithmic visibility of your game, but also the review score. If there are at least 80% of positive reviews on your game, and the number of reviews exceeds 50, your review score will be “Very Positive”; as opposed to “Positive,” which is the score you’ll get for 80% positive reviews if you have less than 50 reviews on your game. Furthermore, if your game has 95% positive reviews and the number of reviews exceeds 500, its review score will be “Overwhelmingly Positive.” This is exactly why the number of reviews is important – it plays a huge role in determining whether or not your game will be able to reach a wider audience.
In 2024, as many as 19,000 titles have been released on Steam, out of which 80% were not played that often (Related article). Among them were probably many games that never got their spotlight because they never met the requirement of at least 10 reviews.
