Steam user reviews are getting a super useful feature in the new beta version of the Steam and Steam Deck clients, with gamers now able to upload their PC’s hardware specs alongside their reviews. Not only does this give the option for a very public way to brag about your gaming PC, but it will mean reviews become a lot more useful, thanks to the added context. A game being review-bombed due to poor performance on old hardware? You’ll know if a review is just adding to that storm. Meanwhile, if a review references consistently poor performance even on high-end hardware, the data will be there to back up the claim.
Piggybacking off Steam’s existing ability to scan your system hardware and use this for its monthly Steam Hardware Survey reports, among other things, the new system isn’t relying on unreliable users to put in their own data. The only downside is that attaching your hardware specs is optional, so if folks are going to complain about performance on a new game while using a 15-year-old graphics card, you might not know about it.
Available only via the beta versions of Steam and SteamOS (as used on the Steam Deck), you’ll have to opt in to that build path to access the new feature right now. However, we’d expect it to roll out to public builds very soon.
To access it, you just navigate to the game you’d like to review, find the “my review” section, and click “add review.” Once you start adding your review, you’ll get a tickbox option to “attach PC specs to this review,” alongside the option to make your review public and note whether you received the game for free.
Also joining the Steam user review overhaul is another feature I’ve been wishing for for ages, which is that if you submit feedback on a Steam Deck Verified rating, you can actually provide a reason for why you disagree with it. This should hopefully massively improve the speed and precision of Valve’s Steam Deck verification program, which we’ve complained about multiple times before.
A handful of other useful new features are included in this update, the first of which is the option to provide anonymized gameplay framerate data to Valve. This is “stored without connection to your Steam account but identified with the kind of hardware you are playing on” and is intended to “help [Valve] learn about game compatibility and improve Steam.” Valve notes that this feature is currently focused on SteamOS, hinting at it being predominantly used for optimizing Valve’s own hardware, such as the upcoming Steam Machine.
Valve also describes the new beta release as having an “improved setting layout and navigation on desktop, deck and mobile devices,” plus there are a host of bug fixes.
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