Steam Beta Lets Gamers Attach Hardware Specs to Reviews

Valve is testing a subtle yet helpful feature in the Steam client beta that lets users add their PC hardware specs to game reviews. By checking "Attach PC Specs to this review" in the desktop or Steam Deck client, a user's saved hardware profile will appear alongside their written game review. The feature can be enabled or disabled on a per-review basis.

Users can save multiple configurations and then choose the one that matches the machine they used for that game. This can help other gamers and Steam Deck owners share their experiences more accurately by adding context to a review, in turn helping potential buyers make more informed game purchases. A review that reports stuttering in a visually rich game, for example, might not carry as much weight when it's associated with a 5-year-old GPU as it would with newer, more powerful hardware.

While Steam beta users are free to start attaching their hardware specs to reviews, those specs don't appear to be available yet to beta or non-beta users shopping in the client. Valve hasn't said when the specs will be visible in the reviews tab yet.

Alongside the specs feature, Valve introduced an experiment that collects anonymized framerate data on SteamOS devices. This should help the company develop a deeper understanding of how games run on Steam Deck and future SteamOS systems. Valve says framerate data isn't linked to specific Steam accounts; instead, it groups results by hardware type.