Emperor 12 Feb @ 12:32pm
Proposal: Separate Early Access and Post-Launch Reviews on Steam
Hi everyone,

I'm sick of Early Access review bombing killing decent games after they’ve been fixed. A game might start off rocky, but after months (or years) of updates, it can become something great—yet old negative reviews still dominate the score.

So, I have a proposal that could help both players and developers get a clearer picture of a game’s evolution.

🎯 The Proposal: A Dual Review System
🔹 Early Access Reviews (EA Score)
These reviews stay separate from post-launch reviews.
Score remains visible so players can see how the game performed in EA.
🔹 Post-Launch Reviews (Final Score)
When a game leaves Early Access, reviews reset for a fresh start.
New score shows the current state of the game.
🟢 Both scores would be displayed side-by-side, allowing players to see:

🔄 Did the game improve over time?
🚀 Did it go from ‘Mostly Negative’ to ‘Mostly Positive’ after launch?
❌ Is it still bad, or did the devs fix everything?
This system would give players a better-informed purchase decision and prevent greatly improved games from being buried under outdated complaints.

❓ Why Is This Needed?
🛑 Old EA reviews often mislead buyers about the game’s current state.
⚖️ Developers don’t get a fair chance to prove their improvements.
📈 Games should be judged based on their launch version, not outdated versions from months/years ago.
📢 Valve, Please Consider This!
I think this would be a huge improvement to Steam’s review system and help good Early Access games get the recognition they deserve once they’ve been fixed.

Let’s discuss! What do you all think? Would this help improve how we judge games on Steam?
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Showing 1-7 of 7 comments
I think i made a similar suggestion a while back, you can already kinda do this by filtering by date range, but a simple filter box to hide EA reviews would be nice and easy to implement.
Support. This is a good suggestion.
For everyone that love to pretend all I do here is shoot down ideas...

I actually like that one.
Originally posted by Thermal Lance:
For everyone that love to pretend all I do here is shoot down ideas...

I actually like that one.

Yep, the data is already there, all they need to do is when you check a box filter the date of the reviews to after the game left EA. So the framework is already in place for it
You can already do rthat. just change the review date range
Originally posted by Start_Running:
You can already do rthat. just change the review date range

Yeah but a checkbox would definitely be easier then having to check every time when it launched out of EA, then having to set a date range. Especially as I see it being a frequent enough thing to justify being its own checkbox.
• Recent Reviews
• Post-launch Reviews
• Early Access Reviews
• All Reviews

It's logical and user-friendly way to show reviews. Not hard to understand.
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Showing 1-7 of 7 comments
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