Steam Updates Review Scores to Accommodate for Language

Valve has updated Steam to display language-specific reviews for some games to be shown in the user’s respective language, a part of Steam’s ongoing efforts to ensure user reviews help customers make informed decisions.

The change is targeted towards providing a more accurate representation of user sentiment across various regions and linguistic groups, as different regions of the world may have vastly different experiences from each other despite playing the same game. 

According to the official Steam blog post, this phenomenon can happen for a myriad of reasons, including translation issues, cultural references, poor network connections, and others. The Overall Review Scores system could not properly portray this until now. 

“Calculating a language-specific review score means that we can better distill the sentiment of these different groups of customers, and in doing so, better serve potential customers that belong to those groups,” Steam wrote in the blog post. 

Upon a sufficient number of reviews written in a particular language, Steam begins calculating a review score for that language. The change is marketed to impact titles with more than 2,000 publicly visible reviews, and with at least 200 written reviews in at least one language. 

To preemptively optimize for community criticism, Steam’s built-in features in the User Reviews can be enabled or disabled to the user’s discretion. The language-specific review score system is turned on by default, but can be disabled.