Review scores. Who needs ’em? Well, Valve reckon Steam didn’t have enough two word verdicts on games, so they’ve introduced a “language-specific” scoring system, which offers separate ratings based on user reviews penned in certain tongues.
The goal’s to paint a more detailed picture of what folks in different parts of the world think of what they’ve played, allowing you to see at a glance whether that game you’ve been putting off adding to your backlog is the bees’ knees among Korean-speaking players. That’s provided said game meets the threshold of having 2,000 publicly visible reviews in total and at least 200 written in the specific language you’re looking for.
“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,” Valve explained. “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.”
“When there are enough reviews written in a particular language, Steam will calculate a review score for that language,” they added. “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.”
So, the usual scores you’re shown when you first navigate to a game’s Steam page haven’t gone anywhere. To see the “language-specific” scores, which are enabled by default, you’ll need to head into the game’s reviews section, then sort via a new drop-down menu labelled language. Below is what doing so currently shows you for shooter Helldivers 2.
There’s a reason I’ve picked that game too. Around the time the Illuminate faction invaded Super Earth, the game saw a spike in negative reviews specifically from Chinese players, rooted in an apparent translation mixup specific to the version of the game in that language. The result was a bit of confusion as players in other regions struggled to work out why the game’s overall rating had suddenly taken a hit. While scrolling back through recent reviews offered an idea of what had happened, in splitting up reviews like this, hopefully Valve have made it easier to tell when something like this has happened.
That’ll probably be useful for developers, who’ll be able to quickly see the change in sentiment among players speaking a certain language, and investigate whether the cause is something they can fix. On the other hand, there’s the potential that in letting players see what certain regions think, we might get some hijinks or chicanery if folks decide to mess around in bad faith. For example, fomenting fresh culture wars by doing battle over which continent has the consensus, or otherwise trying to push verdicts in specfic directions just because of what other folks are doing.
People not using Steam reviews to offer straight-laced, in-depth analysis of a game’s strengths and weaknesses? As someone who prior to getting into this profession left a sarky two line Cyberpunk 2077 review based entirely around disappointment that its character creator didn’t boast an inch-based penis size slider, I can’t imagine such a thing.
