Valve plans to mitigate ‘off-topic review bombs’ on Steam

Valve is once again looking at ways to improve user reviews on Steam. As it turns out, it didn’t exactly fix the problem last time. In a blog post today, the company details how it plans to fight back against unrelated community trolling. In particular, Valve wants to identify and remove what it calls “off-topic review bombs.” A review bomb is when a group of players coordinate to hurt a game by giving it negative reviews. Valve wants to mitigate review bombs if they are unrelated to game content.

A recent, high-profile off-topic review bomb was for Taiwanese horror adventure Devotion. The game featured an art asset that referred to Chinese president as “Xi Jingping Winnie the Pooh Moron.” This is a widespread meme about how president Xi looks like the honey-loving literary character. And it’s one that Xi hates. Once Chinese players discovered the asset, they bombed Devotion’s user-review score.