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Steam’s Public Review Endpoint Switches Off October 22: What to Change, and Why the New API Needs No Key

By Freedom251 Team · · 3 min read

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Steam says it will disable its legacy public review URL, https://store.steampowered.com/appreviews/<appid>?json=1, on October 22, 2026. The replacement is IUserReviewsService/GetAppReviews on Steam’s public WebAPI host. You can retrieve public reviews without a key; an app-associated WebAPI key is optional and gives the request a higher rate limit. This is a migration, not a URL-only swap: request parameters and response parsing also change.

What replaces Steam’s appreviews endpoint?

Steamworks Development announced the change on October 2, 2026. The old store-domain endpoint is scheduled to be disabled on October 22; the announcement does not specify a time zone. The replacement is Steam’s IUserReviewsService/GetAppReviews method, called at https://api.steampowered.com/IUserReviewsService/GetAppReviews/v1/.

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Valve says the method should return “basically the same data,” but its documented request and response formats differ from the old endpoint. Existing scrapers, dashboards, and ingestion jobs therefore need updates. Steam says the move off the store domain is intended to avoid slowdowns when the store is under heavy load and allow more frequent calls; that is Valve’s stated rationale, not a measured performance guarantee. The announcement notes that the User Reviews API launched in 2017. Read the Steamworks announcement.

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Can you call GetAppReviews without a key?

Yes. Steam’s method reference says public review retrieval does not require a key. Anonymous calls share a lower rate limit, while an app-associated WebAPI key raises the limit. Steam does not publish a numeric quota in the reference, so do not build a schedule around an assumed requests-per-minute figure.

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The documented review URL uses the public api.steampowered.com host. Do not confuse it with partner.steam-api.com: Steam’s Web API overview describes that as a partner-only host for secure publisher server requests, and says it requires a publisher WebAPI key on every request. That authentication rule is separate from the optional-key behavior of public GetAppReviews.

How to migrate an existing review scraper

  1. Change the route and request format

    Send a GET request to https://api.steampowered.com/IUserReviewsService/GetAppReviews/v1/. This is a Service interface: Steam says to pass arguments using input_json. Include the required appid and retain the filters your pipeline depends on.

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  2. Translate the old filters

    String filter values become documented enums. The old filter values all, recent, and updated map to Helpful, Recent, and Updated. The review_type and purchase_type parameters also use enums. Rename language to languages, which accepts a list. The method also documents Funny sorting and filters for dates, playtime, Steam Deck, and hardware. Check the method reference for the exact enum values and argument names before changing a production client.

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  3. Revise response parsing

    Do not look for the old success field; use the HTTP status to determine whether the request succeeded. The response no longer includes author.num_games_owned, and weighted_vote_score is numeric rather than a string. New response data includes a refunded field for each review, plus total_matching and day_range_used.

  4. Implement cursor pagination

    The documented default is 20 reviews per page, with a maximum of 100. Use the cursor returned by a response to request the next page. Helpful filtering can widen its actual day range; Steam recommends Recent or Updated when walking all reviews with a cursor, so the traversal can eventually reach an empty result.

  5. Handle caching and throttling

    Steam says anonymous responses may be cached for up to 10 minutes. A rate-limited request returns HTTP 429, but the reviewed reference gives no numeric quota. Use status-aware retry and backoff, monitor repeated 429 responses, and account for possible caching if your pipeline expects every poll to reflect a fresh result.

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Choose filters to match the job

Filter selection affects what your pipeline collects and how it can traverse results. Helpful is the default and is associated with day-range behavior; Recent or Updated is the recommended choice for cursor-based traversal of all reviews. Use the documented date, language, purchase type, review type, playtime, Steam Deck, or hardware options when you need a subset rather than a general review feed. The exact enum names and parameter definitions are in the method reference.

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API migrationgame developmentSteamSteamworksWeb API

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