If it's a f2p game, that makes complete sense.

Most of them are grindy and take thousands of hours to get anywhere, and by that time the player probably has bad stokholm syndrome.

But idk, Ive got 6k hours in Warframe and I left a negative review so w/e.

Also I have combined 11k hours in Skyrim am I now suddenly working for Bethesda? weird logic he just like the game nothing wrong with it also maybe he has more than 1 account ...

Depends on the game I have hundreds of hours in plenty. Especially those I've modded to enhance in various ways.

Completely disagree, I have a couple games with 1000+ hours, and dozens with hundreds over my gaming lifetime. My first Elden Ring playthrough took me about 110 hours, its very feasible that people can accumulate far and above that.

A lot of people like to main a single game and play nothing else, and why should their review not be counted, if anything they're one of the most reliable narrators on the quality of the game.

Also keep in mind if someone goes AFK in the menu or pause screen of a game for break of some kind, that still accumulates time. Its far easier to hit 500 hours than you're giving credit/

Just remove the top and bottom 90% percent quadrant quartile thing of the reviews.

You can already filter reviews between a minimum and maximum playtime.

I have not trusted positive reviews or 'very postitive' review scores on Steam for years.
Your instincts are correct. Look elsewhere for reviews!

Originally posted by shak59:

Just remove the top and bottom 90% percent quadrant quartile thing of the reviews.

I'm assuming you mean 10%, but I don't really see what this accomplishes. For games with relatively few reviews, say 3 figures or less, you risk seriously distorting the aggregate. The smaller the sample, the more irregular the distribution tends to be. When you get into games with thousands of reviews and up outliers become proportionally tiny so there would be very minimal impact to the aggregate.

An arguable marginal gain in precision at the cost of removing legitimate voices. It doesn't strike me as a great trade off.

i have over 1000 cheese burgers in...
ok.. that does not mean the game is good.

Sales were 10X times higher.
ok cheapest toy VS best toy?

Originally posted by Mr. Smiles:

If it's a f2p game, that makes complete sense.

Indeed. Even if it's a paid game. Some people simply are into 1 game.

Odd that people always try to frame things as malice just because they can't understand that other people are different.

If someone was trying to influence reviews, they wouldn't spend 3500 hours playing the game and then leave a single inconsequential review.

OP never played a MMORPG. I have a playtime of 195d 5h 38m 25s on my main character in Everquest 2. Started playing in 2004 and literally played no other game for years and I have more than 1 character.

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

If someone was trying to influence reviews, they wouldn't spend 3500 hours playing the game and then leave a single inconsequential review.

It's not. Because steam shows the review with 3500 hours as the top review. It's literally gaming the system algorithms to start the game on a laptop and just leave it running for days.

Originally posted by Mr. Smiles:

If it's a f2p game, that makes complete sense.

Also if it's competitive multiplayer, f2p or not, large portion of playerbase have accounts specifically for that game and that game alone so in case they get banned from the game, they simply abandon that account and create new one to continue playing. I've seen hundreds of CS2 accounts with 1 or few games (mostly f2p or other competitive mp games) with thousands to 10k+ hours in CS2.

Similarly some MMORPG players can easily accumulate from hundreds to thousands of hours in a single game. Heck, most sandbox open world survival crafting can also. As do many grand strategy and 4x games. I must've racked several thousand hours in Civilization 2, a 4x game, back in the day as it was my most played game 3+ years. On Steam my most played game is Shadow Empire, another 4x game with 568,4 hours on record. There are quite few 4x and grand strategy games I've played hundreds of hours during my lifetime.

Oh, no! Someone enjoys a particular game a lot and spends quite some time playing it.