Steam is taking drastic steps with its reviews and overhauling the system to where games that are claimed with keys (as opposed to purchased directly on Steam) will not count towards the game's rating. This is meant to cut down on abuse by developers who would give out free keys in exchange for good reviews. However, this also means that people who BOUGHT keys from reputable retailers will now not have their ratings count. They can still be viewed, but they won't impact the final rating. I understand them trying to cut down on bad inflated scores but essentially "punishing" everyone who bought a game outside of Steam doesn't seem like the best way to do it IMO.
http://store.steampowered.com/news/24155/
It seems like a solution to something that wasn't actually a problem to me. Unless a game sells very few copies, reviews from people who were given free keys are going to be a small percentage of the whole. Their post says that in some cases reviews that came from Steam keys are significantly higher than reviews of people who bought the game directly from Steam but they didn't mention what percentage of people have these Steam keys from outside sources instead of directly through Steam. Because this Steam review update makes it easy to see for yourself I decided to take a look.
I just looked up Arkham Knight as an example. There are 27,232 reviews for Arkham Knight on Steam. 4,657, or 18%, came from key activations. The other 22,575 reviews came from people who purchased directly on Steam. Since Arkham Knight keys were given out with Nvidia GPUs for quite a while I would guess that this number might actually be higher than normal.
Even if all 4,657 key activation reviews came from people who got the game free in exchange for a positive review (they didn't) they would still be canceling out less than 1 out of every 5 negative reviews. It would be pretty hard for a developer of a game that sells decently well to make a real impact in their overall review score.
Still, I don't see this as punishing anyone. The reviews from people who activated a Steam key still show up on the main store page for every game. If you want to see the overall rating from just those people who activated keys all you have to do is mark one tick box on the store page. If you want to see Steam purchases and key activations added together like they used to be that is also just one tick mark on the store page.
The only thing that really changed is that by default the review score is just based on people who purchased the game through Steam. All the old data is still there and they actually allowed you to filter reviews much better than you ever could before if you want to see more granular data.
Edit: I just checked the review percentage for Rocket League since it is currently the best selling game on Steam again. There are 86,623 total reviews on Steam. Only 3,451, or 4%, of those reviews came from key activations. That kind of backs up my theory that Arkham Knight's 18% might be higher than the norm because of the Nvidia deal. I'm sure there are some games that are even higher than Arkaham Knight though.
