Not all games will land the same in all cultures across the world, and Steam is making a small change to review scores to reflect that. When accessing games with enough scores in your client’s selected language, you’ll see a separate score for that language alongside other metrics.
Valve published a news post for this change, which says that “when there are enough reviews written in a particular language, Steam will calculate a review score for that language,” with review scores displaying based the user’s primary language.
“What this means is that some languages may show more positive review scores, while others may show more negative ones, even for the same game,” the post explains.
With Steam’s userbase exploding in places like China, it’s not hard to see the utility of this. Things that work in games popular with one culture may not work well in another. Or a game may be written well in its developers’ primary language but have a very rough translation–something that won’t be relevant to the users who speak that native language.
This change will take effect for games with more than 2,000 publicly visible reviews, and at least two reviews written in at least one language. The post says Valve “purposely made these thresholds higher than the 10 reviews required to calculate the Overall Review Score” because it wanted to be “pretty confident” in the language-specific score before showing it to other users.
As shown in the screenshot above, provided by Valve, this isn’t meant to take information away from users or manipulate scores. The score still shows the sentiment across all reviews alongside the reviews in your language, as well as all recent reviews, and a deeper language breakdown.
The post says that Valve it knows any changes to review scores will concern users, and states the company has built a variety of features in User Reviews that can be disabled or enabled, should you want to only see the raw review information.
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