Steam is continuing to refresh its customer review system with a small but potentially impactful new feature. Reviews will now note if the user had primarily played the game on the Steam Deck.
Valve announced the update on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday, showcasing a new Steam Deck icon that appears in the top right of a Steam review, next to the star icon that mentions a player played the game on Steam and, therefore, their thoughts will be counted in the overall score. Seems like an appropriate place to put it.
Good morning! We’ve just shipped a new feature on Steam that shows when a customer review was written by someone who played primarily on Steam Deck. Keep an eye out for the Deck icon to see how these players reviewed the game, and let us know what you think! pic.twitter.com/RYVa9wVGYi
— Steam Deck (@OnDeck) August 22, 2024
This might not seem like a big deal, but the gaming experience can vary wildly between your regular ol’ PC and the Steam Deck. There’s a reason why the Steam Deck verification system exists, after all. Some games just haven’t been optimized for it and controllers, and while users can do a lot of heavy lifting to get games to work, it’s often not a complete solution. Despite Steam Deck verification, a game also just might not be pleasant to play on the handheld console (looking at you, Baldur’s Gate 3).
Steam has been working on its review system for years, but has been implementing some changes lately to make top reviews more useful. It began testing a new system that would improve the “helpfulness” of user reviews by pushing ones that just have jokes or ASCII art down through user reporting and machine learning.
Valve also recently updated the platform to improve demo discoverability and the information on Steam store pages by removing links to third-party websites in the description.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.