Steam Updates User Review Scores Based on Language

Steam has updated its review score database to be used with more languages, with different languages having their own calculated review score if enough reviews of a specific game are written in that language. Valve did not disclose what number would be needed for this outside of the fact that it was higher than 10, which is the standard amount needed to calculate a ratings score.

This means that it's theoretically possible for a game to be received Overwhelming Negatively by one language and Overwhelmingly Positively by another, although any cases of this happening will likely be isolated incidents. This change mainly pertains to games in other languages and differences in cultures across the countries. If you or someone you know tends to speak a language other than English, this new update will undoubtedly be useful for you.

Quote From Steam

With today's update, the Review Score shown to you for some games will be calculated from the reviews written in your language. This is part of our ongoing effort to ensure that Steam User Reviews are helping customers make informed decisions when considering the purchase of a new game. Read on for the details behind this change.

A Better Indication of User Sentiment

We launched Steam User Reviews almost twelve years ago to give customers a way to tell each other what they thought about a game, and whether they recommended it or not. A short time later we introduced the concept of a Review Score, which is a simple categorization based on the percentage of positive reviews. It is basically a signal of how happy the overall community around a game was with their purchase, and a useful tool for potential customers to predict their happiness with that game as well.

Steam's growth since then into an even larger global presence means customers in different regions of the world may have vastly different experiences from each other for the same game. There are a variety of reasons this may happen for a particular game, including translation issues, cultural references, poor network connections, and many others; things that the Overall Review Scores haven't been able to capture 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.

Language-specific Review Score

When there are enough reviews written in a particular language, Steam will calculate a review score for that language. The Review Score displayed to users will be based on their primary language. What this means is that some languages may show more positive review scores, while others may show more negative ones, for the same game.

This change impacts games that have more than 2,000 publicly visible reviews, and with at least 200 written reviews in at least one language. We purposely made these thresholds higher than the 10 reviews required to calculate the Overall Review Score; this is because we wanted to be pretty confident in the language-specific score before showing it to users.

For games where Steam has generated language-specific review scores, you'll see this on the game's store page:

If you want to dig deeper into what's going on, you can click the "See language breakdown" link to see a more detailed view by language and what Review Score those customers will see.

Maintaining Trust

We realize that whenever we make changes to User Reviews, we're inviting some scrutiny into our motivations for making those changes. Maintaining trust in the system is crucial to us, so we've erred on the side of being as transparent as possible. To that end, we've built many features in User Reviews that can be enabled or disabled, letting you access the raw reviews in many different ways.

At the same time, we want User Reviews to be useful to customers from the very start, without them having to twiddle with the many knobs the system has–this is the primary reason why the new language-specific review score system is turned on by default. If you want to go back to seeing the Overall Review Score based on all user reviews, ignoring your language, you can change that setting here in your Store preferences.

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