Will fewer people buy your Steam game due to player reviews?
Once again, we asked a lot of fans! Also: the latest news & this week in Steam.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
What the hey? Is it time for another GDCo newsletter already? It is, and this time, we’re going back to our our latest survey of ‘Steam fans’ (last tapped for questions about games and AI), to ask them about another key subject - Steam player reviews.
Before we start, we dig (haha!) The Data Drop newsletter making a visual (scrollable) guide to every block ever added to Minecraft. (The game started with 26 classic blocks in 2009 - and yes, obsidian was there from the start - and finishes up in 2024 with block types like, uh, ‘waxed exposed copper trap door’.)
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >110 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: GTA, Modern Warfare 4 go!
Let’s end out the week by taking a look at some of the top discovery & platform news since last time out:
Our friends at ICO’s Footprints.gg again put out their latest ‘trad media’ coverage report (above), and GTA 6 will just be #1 until the game comes out, apparently. But next? Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 announced its Beta schedule, and Palworld’s 1.0 is going swimmingly, with peak Steam CCU now close to 1 million.
Some notable Valve changes to Steam wishlist org for players, which we teased a few days back: players can now sort their wishlists by specific named categories (like ‘Next Fest’, ‘Wait For Reviews’, etc.) And categories can have customized wishlist notifications - or none at all. Most players won’t use this - but some will.(And games with demos are called out in wishlist view, with mouseover for trailer!)
The above wishlist changes were done, in part, to support better Steam game gifting, including guest checkout “which lets a family member or friend make a gift purchase without needing to create a Steam account”, gift cards/games sent by email, and optional public ‘wishlist category’ lists for birthday/Xmas gifting. (All smart.)
Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service is “now available on Prime Video on Fire TVs in the US and UK… [you can] start playing in seconds right on your TV, using a controller or your phone.” Since it’s included with Prime, we imagine this could boost pickup - games include: “Hogwarts Legacy, EA Sports FC 26, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to GameNight party games like Clue, Ticket to Ride, and Taboo.”
The Circana U.S. game hardware/software charts for June 2026 show total $ down 21% to $4.5b, mainly down to poor comps with Switch 2 launch in June 2025 (spending down 79%!) But software was down 12% to $3.9 billion, too, thx to console & mobile drops. (Xbox hardware units were up 86% vs. last June, tho..)
As we’ll do every week, we looked at the top unreleased Steam demos by CCU using GDCo Pro data: PvE autobattler roguelike Guildrun is now #1 - more about it next week. (Co-op bomb defusal game Bombanana! slipped to #2, and slot machine-based autobattler Slotbound went up to #4.)
Netflix has said it’s early days for its game biz a few times: well, it’s still “early signals” from a “small base” mode, with the Netflix Playground app getting 3x daily player growth, and Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters saying “monthly active players for cloud games have increased 11x.” (No, we don’t know from where to where.)
Xbox things: it’s launching Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC, with emulated OG Xbox games inc. BliNX & Conker: Live and Reloaded; it’s testing ad-supported cloud streaming on existing games for Xbox Insiders; the Meta Horizon+ sub service is getting a ‘starter edition’ of Game Pass with ~50 games.
Gamescom 2026? It’s full of exhibitors for the allotted space (tho not all available Messe space, perhaps?), a bit like a hovercraft is full of eels. In addition: “Several [new] exhibitors have also joined the lineup, including Konami, Tencent Games, Embark Studios, and Level Infinite.” (It’s doing a good job of smooshing biz/consumer.)
PlayStation things: this editorial from The Verge on no more physical PS discs notes that “Capcom… reported that an astounding 93 percent of its game sales were for digital copies in its last fiscal year.” And Mat Piscatella reveals that “7 [PlayStation games] have sold more than 100k physical units year-to-date.” But still people mourn…
Microlinks: Bloomberg’s look at the creation of the new Steam Machine has a Valve engineer re: hardware component pricing: “Honestly, it’s still getting worse.”; new UK survey on kids’ online experiences [.PDF] Roblox/Minecraft stats & more; by Day 3, active creator accounts predicted FPS tier success “with 72% accuracy.”
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Will fewer people buy Steam games due to reviews?
As we showed with our recent AI survey, we’ve been having fun surveying ~3,800 ‘Steam fans’ - more committed players who respond to giveaways online, etc - about multiple subjects from June 25th to July 2nd, 2026. Why? There’s a lack of this type of ‘large respondent pool’ with granular data on how people interact with Steam!
And the second subject we asked these players was something that many of us pay a lot of attention to: Steam player reviews. But what do players say about reviews? Firstly, we checked their interest:
So yes, player reviews are a big deal on Steam. 40.5% of all respondents say they always check reviews before buying, and 32% say they do it most of the time. (From there, 19.4% say they check it sometimes, 5.6% occasionally, and just 2.5% never.)
Not really that surprising, perhaps - but good to see it confirmed. The really interesting question is the next one - which Steam player ratings make people think twice. Before we get there, let’s remind us of how Steam’s review categories work:
There’s been plenty of end-result data in the past showing that lower-rated games perform worse - particularly those with Mixed ratings and below (some of which will be just due to game quality, but there’s a knock-on effect!):
Given these graphs, we weren’t sure when people would definitely say ‘I’m less likely to buy this game with X rating’, which is important because it may significantly affect long tail. And here’s what they said:
Just listing it out: 20.3% of respondents said an all-time rating of less than Very Positive reviews (Mostly Positive or below) would make them “less likely to buy”. And 30.8% said ratings of Mixed or below would make them less likely. (So if your overall review is Mixed, that’s half of your audience looking at your game skeptically…)
From there, 34.9% of those replying said it would be Mostly Negative ratings or below that really put you off, and only 9.7% said that “no rating would make a significant different for me.” So: reviews - they really matter. But a Mostly Positive rating? Less of a death sentence for player interest than you might think…
Finally, we asked about ‘recent’ ratings, on people’s mind because other-language review bombs will still hit ‘recent’, even if the main rating is only showing English language reviews.
As you can see, 32.9% of respondents said that yes, if a game has ‘worse’ recent reviews than all-time, they’ll '“look very carefully” at recent reviews. 47.4% said they would maybe check it, but “understand there are sometimes short-term review complaints.” And only 14.5% said they wouldn’t pay attention.
We also asked open-ended text questions on ‘What do you find most/least helpful about the Steam player review system?’, and we got >2,500 usable responses (!!) for each question. So, with some Claude help, here’s the top ‘helpful’ things about reviews, alongside example actual player responses:
Finding out about bugs, performance & technical issues (14% of respondents): “I only check to see if people report bugs… [and to] see info on performance, more than for the content quality of a game.”
Overall score / aggregate player consensus for games (8% of respondents): “The overall rating percentage cuts through noise instantly. 'Overwhelmingly Positive' from 40,000 reviews tells me something no trailer ever could.”
The ability to filtering, sort & drill down on data (7% of respondents): “The split overview with most helpful and most recent reviews. The ability to respond. The highlighting of developer replies. The graph with the distribution of positive and negative reviews.”
Playtime display positively affecting reviewer credibility (6% of respondents): “The most helpful part for me is seeing the reviewer's playtime right next to their opinion. It really helps filter out knee-jerk reactions from people who barely played.”
Also mentioned prominently: honesty & authenticity from actual players, the ability of select reviews to go in-depth with both pluses and minuses, and the recent/overall split.
Unlike the positives, there’s a lot more consensus on ‘What do you find least helpful about the Steam player review system?’ around one particular subject:
Joke/meme/troll & low-effort reviews (20% of respondents): "The joke reviews that copypaste the same review on every game - but there are less of them now since Steam made awards less useful, so there's no incentive to bait for awards in reviews.”
Review bombing / brigading / off-topic drama (11% of respondents): “When reviews are coordinated attacks by groups of people over some trivial matter that they blow out of proportion, wasting your time reading about why the game now has bad reviews.”
Fake, paid, bot & AI-generated reviews (6% of respondents): "Fake positive reviews from friend groups or purchased accounts still slip through. When a new game launches with 200 glowing reviews in the first 24 hours and each reviewer has 1 game in their library, something's off.” (We’re not sure re: ‘1 game in library’, but we still see it…)
Also mentioned: Bias, emotion & unfair negativity, inappropriate helpfulness votes & award farming, the binary thumbs up/down choice with no ‘neutral’ option, and reviews with lack of detail. But overall: player reviews are a big net positive for Steam…
This week’s Steam debuts: Shift At Midnight hits…
