How to get notified of new Steam reviews (email or Discord)

Steamworks gives you tools to read, flag and respond to reviews, but its user review documentation describes no alert for new ones. To hear about a review without refreshing your store page, you have five options: check the Most Recent view yourself, add a free Discord bot, sign up for an alert service, run a small script, or build your own scheduled workflow on Steam's reviews API.

One thing changed recently. On October 22, 2026, Valve switched off the old store.steampowered.com/appreviews/<appid>?json=1 address. That URL now redirects to the store front page, so any homemade alert that still calls it has gone quiet without telling you. More on the fix below.

1. Check the Most Recent view yourself

Free, and fine for a game that gets a few reviews a week. Bookmark this address with your App ID in place of <appid>:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/<appid>/reviews/?browsefilter=mostrecent&filterLanguage=all

It lists the newest reviews first in every language. The catch is that you have to remember to look, and launch weeks or sales can bring in more reviews than you can follow by hand. Valve's own advice in the Steamworks docs is to set a limit on the time you spend reading reviews, so a fixed daily check is a reasonable habit.

2. Use a Discord bot

Steamy by Codecks is free for all teams. It posts your Steam reviews to a Discord channel you choose, sends weekly digests of how your rating moves, and translates reviews into English. It suits teams that already work in Discord. You get one message per review, so a busy day means a busy channel.

3. Sign up for an alert service

Steam Review Alert sends email and Discord notifications for new reviews, community discussions and sales. When we checked in October 2026, the free plan covered one game with email and daily checks, while paid plans added Discord, hourly checks and more games (the Publisher plan was $40 per month). Prices were on a limited-time offer at the time, so check the pricing section on their page before you decide.

4. Run a self-hosted script

Review Pulse for Steam is a free, MIT-licensed Python script that watches one game and posts each new review to a Discord channel. It needs a machine or server to run on. Its page says the current version already reads from Steam's new reviews API.

5. Build your own on Steam's reviews API

If you want full control over the format, where alerts land, or how often they run, call Steam's User Reviews Web API yourself. The endpoint is:

https://api.steampowered.com/IUserReviewsService/GetAppReviews/v1/

It is a Service interface, so parameters go in one URL-encoded input_json value. A request for the newest reviews looks like this before encoding:

{"appid": 1234567, "filter": 1, "languages": ["all"], "purchase_type": 1, "num_per_page": 100, "cursor": "*"}

What each setting does, per the Steamworks documentation:

filter: 1 sorts by most recently created. The default (0, Helpful) sorts by helpfulness, which is wrong for alerts.
languages: ["all"] returns every language. Leaving it empty returns English only.
purchase_type: 1 includes everyone. The default (0) returns only reviews from players who bought the game on Steam, so reviews from key activations, such as press and curator copies, would be missing.
num_per_page maxes out at 100. Pass the returned cursor to get the next page.
key is optional. Calls without a key share a lower rate limit and can be cached for up to 10 minutes. A rate-limited call returns HTTP 429. A Web API key associated with your app gets the higher limit.

Each review carries a recommendationid, voted_up, language, review text, timestamp_created, refunded and the author's playtime as a count of minutes. Save the IDs you have already reported so the same review never alerts twice.

In n8n, that becomes a short chain: a Schedule Trigger, an HTTP Request node with the URL above, a Split Out node on reviews, and a Remove Duplicates node with the operation Remove Items Processed in Previous Executions, Keep Items Where set to Value Is New, and recommendationid as the value to dedupe on. Run it once before you connect any alert, because on the first run every review counts as new. Then send the result to Gmail, or POST it to a Discord webhook (Server Settings, Integrations, Create Webhook). Discord limits a webhook message's content to 2,000 characters, so trim long reviews first.

If your alerts stopped in late October 2026

Tools built on /appreviews need these changes, from Valve's migration notes:

Move to the new endpoint and wrap parameters in input_json.
filter and the type settings are now numbers. Recent is 1, and "all purchase types" is 1.
language is now languages, a list.
The response has no success field. Check the HTTP status instead.
weighted_vote_score is now a number, not a string, and author.num_games_owned is gone.

Which option fits

Option	Cost	Where alerts land	Upkeep
Most Recent page	Free	Your browser	You check by hand
Steamy (Discord bot)	Free	Discord	Add the bot once
Steam Review Alert	Free plan, paid tiers	Email, Discord on paid plans	None
Review Pulse script	Free	Discord	Keep a machine running
Your own workflow	Your hosting	Anywhere	You maintain it

Alerts are half the job

A ping per review tells you something happened. It does not tell you that six players hit the same crash on a save file. Once alerts arrive, read for patterns: bugs, performance, price complaints, requests and praise. Fix what repeats.

Respond with care. Steamworks lets you post an official developer response from a review's detail page (open the review, then use "Write Official Developer Response" under moderator controls). Valve also warns that a response can draw more attention than the review itself, and that not every review needs one. Save replies for reviews where the player is missing information or hit a bug you have since fixed.

A daily digest instead of a ping per review

If you would rather get one summary than a stream of messages, we make an n8n template for that. Steam Review Digest reads your new reviews each morning through the reviews API above, groups them into up to five themes with counts, picks quotes checked word for word against the original review, and drafts replies in the player's language for the negative reviews that matter. The digest goes to Gmail, Discord or both, and it never posts anything on Steam. It runs on your own n8n with your own OpenAI API key, which adds a small per-use cost billed by OpenAI. It is also on itch.io, and our gaming page has the details.

Sources

Steam is a trademark of Valve Corporation. Discord is a trademark of Discord Inc. n8n is a trademark of n8n GmbH. ReadyUpAgents is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by n8n, Google, Valve, Steam or Discord.