response four Steam reviews

(Shortened/missing content to fit the around 600 wordcount)

Steam is the hub for most personal computer gamers. It has a selection of games to buy and download, a social system to create your own persona and befriend others, as well as a system for user written reviews. How does Steam’s way of going about user reviews change the mentality of using the application?

Steam uses a system of a thumbs up or a thumbs down, much like Youtube’s. To first write a review a user has to own the game before hand, this prevents people from looking at the game’s trailer and screenshots then writing how much they love or hate it based off of what little they've seen. Steam has a group of internet famous people, like TotalBiscut, who have a series of game reviews and games they recommend to the community. Then Steam has the reviews of the famous game reviewing sites like IGN. The last of the subjective reviews are the community written reviews that show how many people found a user specific review to be helpful or unhelpful.  If there are any replies to the reviews they will be shown underneath the original review. Finally objective reviews are those that have plainly stated minimum and recommended specs for the computer to run the game, what genres the game is under,and a brief description of the game.

Steam doesn’t have typical demographics such as children, or ethnic, but instead it’s broken up into categories of “gamers”. There are three specific demographic on Steam: budget gamers, value gamers, and elitists. Budget gamers are those that have a cheap gaming rig that plays games at low setting and usually don’t make many purchases for games. Then we have the value gamers that have decent rigs and have a medium amount of money budgeted off for games. Finally are the elitists. Elitists are those with rigs that can perform smoothly under almost any conditions, and have a plethora of games to play at their fingertips.

Someone who would be examining the reviews could almost tell each person’s demographic by their review. A budget gamer would be geared to write more on how much longevity the game held, and how happy they were with the money the spent. A value gamer would include how smooth the game ran for the specs they have. Elitists would comment how beautiful, and mechanically detailed the game was.

The way that review system works changes how reviewers think about the games. For example, gamers have mentioned how little reviewers talk about how fun a game is anymore, instead their attention is drawn more towards the mechanical aspects of the game. Steam’s community, regardless that they too post reviews talking about the mechanics, upvotes and spotlights the reviews that are humorous and give experiences of fun times as reviews. “If I had to pick this game or my girlfriend, I’d pick this game...Edit: I am now single,” is at the top of the highest reviews for the game Skyrim. The community makes local stars out of those that do a good job at correctly emphasizing the good times that can be had in the game world.