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Steam’s Public Review Endpoint Switches Off October 22—The Replacement Doesn’t Require a Key

Steam’s store review endpoint is scheduled to shut down October 22, 2026. The replacement GetAppReviews API needs no key for public review retrieval, but requires request, parser, and pagination changes.
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Steam plans to disable its public store review endpoint on October 22, 2026. The replacement, IUserReviewsService/GetAppReviews, retrieves public reviews without an API key. An app-associated WebAPI key is optional: it raises the rate limit, while anonymous calls share a lower limit.

What replaces Steam’s appreviews endpoint?

Steamworks Development announced the change on October 2, 2026: the store URL https://store.steampowered.com/appreviews/<appid>?json=1 is scheduled to be disabled on October 22. Steam names the public WebAPI method IUserReviewsService/GetAppReviews as its replacement. The documented request URL is https://api.steampowered.com/IUserReviewsService/GetAppReviews/v1/.

The announcement gives no time zone for the October 22 deadline, so treat it as a date rather than assuming a particular cutoff hour. As of October 7, 2026, Steam had announced the future disablement; it had not yet taken effect.

Steam says the new method should return “basically the same data,” but it changes the request and response formats. Existing scripts and services need a migration, not just a URL substitution. Valve says moving the endpoint off the store domain is intended to avoid slowdowns when the store is under heavy load and allow more frequent calls; that is the stated rationale, not a published performance guarantee. The User Reviews API originally launched in 2017.

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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 callers share a lower rate limit. Supplying an app-associated WebAPI key raises the rate limit, so the decision is about request volume and operational needs—not whether public reviews are accessible at all.

Steam does not publish a numeric request quota in the reviewed method reference. Do not build around an assumed requests-per-minute figure: monitor HTTP responses and implement backoff for HTTP 429 rate-limit responses. The documentation also says anonymous responses may be cached for up to 10 minutes.

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Use the documented public host, api.steampowered.com, for this method. Steam separately describes partner.steam-api.com as a partner-only host for secure publisher server requests; that host requires a publisher WebAPI key on every request. Its authentication rule does not apply to anonymous calls to the public review method. See Steam’s Web API overview.

What needs to change in a review scraper?

1. Replace 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 the method arguments using input_json. Include the required appid, then carry over the filters your pipeline needs using the new method’s documented arguments.

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2. Translate filters instead of copying old string values

Some old string filters become enums. The legacy filter choices corresponding to all, recent, and updated map to Helpful, Recent, and Updated. The new method also documents enum values for review_type and purchase_type. Rename language to languages; the new parameter is a list.

Additional documented filters and sorting options include Funny sorting, date and playtime ranges, Steam Deck status, and hardware. Choose only the criteria your downstream use case requires, and validate your enum values against Steam’s current method reference.

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3. Update response handling

  • Check the HTTP status rather than expecting a success field; the new response no longer includes that field.
  • Remove dependencies on author.num_games_owned, which is no longer returned.
  • Parse weighted_vote_score as a number rather than a string.
  • Account for the per-review refunded field and the response fields total_matching and day_range_used.

4. Paginate with the returned cursor

The documented page size is 20 reviews by default and 100 at most. Use the cursor returned by the method to request the next page rather than assuming page numbers or offsets. Helpful filtering can widen its actual day range; for a cursor walk intended to reach all available reviews, Steam recommends Recent or Updated so the traversal eventually reaches an empty result.

5. Make the job resilient to throttling and caching

Handle HTTP 429 with monitored retries and backoff, and account for anonymous responses being cached for up to 10 minutes. If the workload needs a higher rate limit, use an app-associated key; Steam’s reviewed documentation does not state a precise quota for either access tier.

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How should you choose filters for a review pipeline?

Start with the job’s purpose. Helpful is the default-oriented choice, but its effective day range can widen. Recent or Updated is the better fit when the job must walk reviews with a cursor until there are no more results. Then apply the relevant language list, purchase type, review type, date, playtime, Steam Deck, or hardware constraints. The method’s Funny sorting option can serve a different ordering need than the main filter choice.

Because Steam describes the response as basically the same data rather than identical, compare representative old and new responses during migration. In particular, verify your parser’s assumptions about changed fields and types before relying on the replacement in dashboards, archives, or alerting.

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