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Notes -
I feel like you just keep describing systems the Steam review score already has.
It a positive/negative aggregate which only counts steam purchases (hard to game review numbers when each review requires giving money to Valve), weights the descriptive categories based on the total number of reviews, has a recent reviews subcategory to downweight early reviews.
Since it only counts paid Steam purchases, it works especially great with niche genres. The steam review percentage doesn't correspond to what fraction of people like the game, it corresponds to what fraction of people who looked at the game and thought it interesting enough to spend money on liked it. (it works less well when the game has a divisive feature that doesn't neatly cleave across genre lines, such as any game with timers getting like a -10% to the review score)
My one big issue with the steam store is not with the reviews, but that recommendations of similar games seem to weigh popularity way more than similarity. Though I don't think there's a magic fix to discoverability, there is just too games coming out for that.
I'm not claiming these are some new revolutionary ideas, I'm pointing out why a simple ratio of positive/negative reviews don't work in a competitive and saturated environment like this.
This is a hard problem to solve and Valve has clearly thought about this quite a bit and their system is decent.
When there are a lot of purchases, sure, but initially you can spend part of your marketing budget gifting keys to sympathetic people, which people do.
Gifting keys to sympathetic people is free, you can just generate keys for your own game. But those don't count towards the review score. Review manipulation requires buying the game from dummy steam accounts with actual money and probably obfuscated payment methods. Which is not to say it doesn't happen, but there is a pretty clear line between marketing and probably steam tos violating review purchasing.
When there is pretty much 0% chance of discovery there isn't much of a difference. This is rampant on all major online marketplaces with user reviews as well as social media.
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