It's no secret that user-submitted Steam Reviews have often been quite controversial , especially during so-called " review bombings ". In these instances, specific games have been targeted with a deluge of negative reviews, thus crashing the overall user review score on Valve's platform.

One of the earliest scenarios was the review bombing of Firewatch , Campo Santo 's acclaimed adventure game released in 2016. The following year, YouTuber PewDiePie racially insulted a player during a livestream in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds ( PUBG ), and Campo Santo's founder Sean Vanaman asked YouTube to remove all of PewDiePie's videos from the platform. However, in retaliation, PewDiePie's legion of followers went en masse on Steam to leave negative reviews on Firewatch .

Just a week after the controversy, Valve added histograms to user-submitted Steam Reviews to help them make sense of these situations. However, review bombings continued:

That said, in some instances, negative Steam reviews can be helpful to the developer if they point out actual problems with the game . One such scenario is whenever there are performance issues. , Valve has introduced the " option to attach hardware specs when writing or updating a Steam User Review on a game's store page ", which could be really useful for developers as they diagnose performance problems mentioned in their game's Steam reviews.

The new Steam Client Beta also introduced another option: to send " anonymized frame rate data " to Valve. This data will be stored "without connection to your Steam account, but identified with the kind of hardware you are playing on." Valve claims it will help them improve Steam and overall game compatibility , with a focus on devices running SteamOS .

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