Friend Reviews on store pages

[Chewable C++]

I am surprised that I can't find other mention of this change, but, at some point in the past few months, friend reviews no longer appear at the top of the store page review section. They no longer appear anywhere!

This continues to bug me, as I tend to rely more heavily on friend reviews than random reviews.

Why was this change made? I can see perhaps diminishing the visibility of that feature, but why remove it completely? That was a very good feature.

Please bring it back.

[Chewable C++]

I'm not talking about the front page. I'm talking about individual store pages.

[alpasy]

yeah, that was rather strange decision to remove friend reviews. i mean you have friends for a reason, isn't it?

[mendel]

I can see how Steam might think you buy more games if you don't see negative reviews from friends. Posting to your feed, you'll buy if you see a positive review, and forget a negative review, but if the store page reminds you, they might lose a sale.

However, this is only a sound argument from the perspective of a single publisher; from the persepctive of the game store, you have to assume people are going to spend their gaming budget on the store they prefer (i.e. Steam presumably), so it is in Steam's best interests to make the purchases the best they can be: they're not the ones that lose money if you choose another game because your friend gave a bad review to this one, you're still going to buy something on Steam, right?

You can still access the friend reviews via the community hub, but it's a long journey since the link that went there from the store page has also gone away some time ago. In practice, this means I have to rely on the reviews of strangers, and that makes Steam just a bit less attractive

[Chewable C++]

Yeah, someone just pointed that out elsewhere, but that is indeed a "long journey". Very inconvenient, especially if you don't know ahead of time whether friend reviews exist for a particular game.

[alpasy]

i think friend reviews work both ways really: they very well can be positive, but some people tend to buy games on big sales anyways, so a good review from a friend i trust (instead of just strangers) might be that last argument i'm looking for when i browse games in the shop.

i think they removed the feature simply due to a new focus on "recent" reviews instead of old ones (and your friends more likely played the game some time ago than recently).

but still, i'd like to consider their opinion anyways, old or new. i'm not that stupid, i understand that certain flaws might've been patched away since the time my friend played the game. but the general impression still stands (usually).

upd: here is the "long journey" post just in case.