Valve has updated how user reviews appear on Steam to ensure consumers primarily see scores calculated from reviews written in their language. The company said the pivot will allow users to more effectively make informed purchasing decisions.
Notably, Valve explained the shift means user reviews will now more accurately reflect the impact of translation issues, cultural references, poor network connections, and other issues that might be region-specific.
“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,” reads a blog post.
“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.”
The change will impact titles that have over 2,000 publicly visibly reviews—including a minimum of 200 written 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,” added Valve.
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The company explained review scores might now vary from user to user depending on their primary language. For instance, individual titles might appear to have been more positively reviewed in one language compared to another.
Valve acknowledged the sudden change might invite “some scrutiny” but said it was candid about its motivations in a bid to preserve trust in its review system. Users who want to revert to the older, language-inclusive review system can adjust their Store preferences.
“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,” Valve continued.
“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.”