REVIEWS

[EmTArtista]

Why can't you review games after they have been returned?

[serebix]

To prevent review bombing from people that did not put more then 2h into the game and therefore might be bias or cannot rate objectivly.

[Psyringe]

Originally posted by EmTArtista:

Why can't you review games after they have been returned?

Originally posted by serebix:

To prevent review bombing from people that did not put more then 2h into the game and therefore might be bias or cannot rate objectivly.

I don't think there's any particular reason behind it, other than the "you can only review games that you own" requirement that is as old as the review feature itself.

If this were a conscious effort to prevent people from review-bombing, then I would expect reviews of refunded games to get deleted. But that isn't the case. You absolutely _can_ buy a game, review it, and then refund it. You can also use this to review-bomb a title if you really want to. The reviews will stay, they just get a "game refunded" notice attached to them.

Additionally, if Steam wanted to "reduce bias from people who did not put more than 2h into a game", then why is the review threshold set to just 15 miinutes of playtime?

Finally, it may be noteworthy that you can play a game for 200 hours via Steam Family Share, and still won't be able review it. Steam will show you the _interface_ for writing the review, and will even encourage you "tell others whether you liked the game", but when you try to actually send the review, it doesn't go through.

So no, I don't think there's actually much thought or intention behind not letting people review games that they have refunded. It's just that Steam's review system was always designed with the idea that you can only review games that you actually own and have at least started playing. And when Steam got new features like family sharing or easy refunds, which both create situations where you _did_ play the game for long enough to write a review as valid as hundreds of others, even though you never owned it or no longer do, the review system simply never got updated to accomodate for these cases.

In short: If you want to leave a review for a game that you intend to refund, you have to write the review before refunding the game. Otherwise it won't work. And the reason is probably just technical, not necessarily intentional. If you absolutely want to leave a review for Golden Idol, I suppose you _could_ buy it again, review it, and refund it again.