Valve has updated its policy concerning Steam’s Curator program to consider the possibility of paid endorsement.
A ninja update over the weekend included the warning that any participant who had “accepted money or other compensation for making a product review or for posting a recommendation” had to disclose that factor within their post.
The necessity of this full disclosure was added after concerns were raised by community members over the effect the new Curator system would have for discovery on the Steam store.
Unfortunately for them, Valve has also given developers the freedom to decide which Curators appear on their Steam page. This gives each game developer the ability to highlight good reviews and also to hide the bad ones.
If we’ve learned anything from past happenings, it is that developers who try to silence bad reviews about their games ultimately end up in a gooey mess. It’s hard trying to censor the web and sooner or later community members start rioting against such activities. That only leads to Steam officials becoming involved and taking down the game until they adhere to the set policies.
With the new Steam Curator functionality and the relative updates, we’ll see if any developer is dumb enough to cut off the bad reviews on its page.
The Steam Curator feature was launched last month and is designed to make good games more visible on the ever more crowded service. You can follow Curators of your choice and keep yourself updated about what games they are recommending.
