Oh Valve, are you kidding me?!

Yes, review bombing is a problem, but this has to be one of the most "Valve" solution to a problem I've ever seen. As if a game's store page isn't enough of a cluttered monstrosity.

what's the problem?

Seems fine. Move along.

This looks awesome, so you can see how people react to updates. What's wrong with that?

Technically, there's nothing wrong with it... ...yet. I'm really just commenting how this is one of the most "Valve thing" Valve have ever done.

That said, this bears all the greatest hits of a "Valve thing:" cluttering up the already monstrously crowded Steam store pages, passing the buck of moderation and quality control to the users, and opening up the bowels of Steam then expecting the market to "fix" the problems for them. This was the exact thinking behind such things as Greenlight, Early Access, Paid Mods, Trading Cards, the Discovery Update and Curators, and they all turned out mixed bags at best.

Already, I've seen some devs expressing their concern that this data would just be used by review bombers to min-max their impact. I haven't seen it myself yet, but considering Valve's history, you can understand my scepticism.

I see where you are comming from and I do agree somewhat. It's just that I think that this feature is more usefull to me than for example Greenlight which was a total mess

Its basic usefulness is not in question. The issue here is that Valve explicitly stated that this was their solution to the "review bombing" problem. While time will tell whether it works, as I said, this is one of the most "Valve thing" Valve have ever done to try to fix a problem, which warrants some scepticism.

Ah ok, fair enough. Yeah, I can see that being a legit criticism.

On the flip side, Valve has always (usually) been about being open, about community, about customer service...this is just another tool to empower the consumer, to get more information.

Is it too much? Will it create bias? Maybe. But as they say, "Buyer beware".

Yea saw that, suspect it's game companies pressuring them when (honestly) many of them deserve it, it's one of the few voices gamers legitimately have. Gaming media ain't sticking up for them, basically service the Publishers in alot of cases, heck, many of them practically hold you in contempt. It was kinda only a matter of time because "Overwhelmingly Negative" was getting snuffed out.

Yeah, Valve have always aimed for a more laissez-faire approach to regulating Steam. I'm not against giving consumers more information - quite the opposite. However, they explicitly said they're doing this to combat review bombing specifically. In terms of giving consumers more information, I'm all for this. In terms of accessibility and ease of use, the extra clutter does raise questions, but nothing that can't be fixed with a second look at the issue. But in terms of solving a very specific problem? That's where my biggest question marks lie.

Review bombings do work, and I'm not going to argue its legitimacy as a form of protest. That said, the flip side is that I've seen many games receiving negative reviews from people simply demanding Chinese and Russian localisations, and I had to wonder if it's fair to use the review system for that. More recently, Sonic Mania came out with an always-online bug and a lack of transparency on their use of DRM. Both issues were very quickly fixed, but to this day, the game's reviews page remains a venting ground for anger against Denuvo in general, instead of critique of the game specifically, and I just had to wonder if that's a fair use of the system as well.

Fact is, in my experience, when people are given power to do something, they will inevitably abuse it. Will these histograms fix the problem, as Valve claim? I don't know. Time will tell. All I know is that this is a very "Valve thing" way to fix a problem, and "Valve things" have historically mixed effectiveness.

Looks like a great idea. Gives users access to more detailed information. Reviews over time can really paint a picture of a game (especially service based games).

Looks great to me