Steam is introducing a new system to improve the “helpfulness” of user reviews on its platforms, and it may spell bad news for your sass and one-word jokes.
Valve posted a platform update Wednesday, and along with the usual patches and bug fixes, it introduced the beta for a user review system, which is now on by default during its testing period. It seeks to rank reviews by quality, moving comments that help people with making a buying decision up and pushing jokey ones down.
The company says this is being done through a combination of user reporting and machine learning, although it’s a work in progress. Some users might leave a helpful review that’s only a word or two, for example, so using an algorithm isn’t a perfect solution.
Note that Steam isn’t getting rid of your ability to make memes in the reviews section entirely. “User reviews that are identified as being unhelpful for potential customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes, will be sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page,” a post explaining the change states. “That doesn’t mean players won’t ever see these humorous, but unhelpful posts, but it hopefully means that they’ll see them less frequently when trying to learn about a game.”
So, if you want to see these so-called unhelpful reviews, you can toggle the setting off by going to Display above the user reviews for each game and toggling off Use new helpfulness system. If you like the system, you can report reviews you see.
Steam is cracking down on unhelpful or unrelated content across its platform. On Tuesday, Valve announced new rules for store page descriptions that are rolling out in September and prohibit links to other websites or games on Steam unless they’re in the dedicated sections. This is to cut down on player confusion and generally bad descriptions overall. These are some of the many changes being made to Steam as of late, which also include more streamlined Steam Family features and native Game Recording, which is now in beta.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.