Steam introduces the distribution of reviews by "language principle"

The waves of scandals forced Steam to change its review system — now the “language issue” is in the first place. The update was released on August 18.

Valve has decided to generate game ratings by language for those games that have at least 2,000 public reviews and at least 200 reviews written in the same language. In such cases, users will see not only the overall score, but also the rating based on reviews in their language. Valve chose this number for a reason. After all, the minimum of 10 reviews would not be enough to calculate an objective result.

According to the company, the purpose of the update is to “better express the sentiments” of different groups of players. It is often foreign players who are the first to face localization problems, and now this will be better reflected in the reviews. Valve reminded that many features in the reviews can be turned on or off manually, but the new system for languages is enabled by default.

Officially, the company doesn’t mention the review bombardment, but it’s hard to separate the update from recent incidents. For example, the souls-like Wuchang: Fallen Feathers received a wave of negative reviews in Chinese. By the way, as a result, the game received a patch that changed the plot and historical interpretation. Also in early summer, Helldivers 2 faced more than 2600 reviews from players, mostly from China, who were dissatisfied with the development of the in-game campaign.

So now users will see not only a generalized picture of reviews, but also a localized snapshot of players’ opinions in a particular language. Another update taught Steam to show how many frames in the game are real and how many — are generated. In parallel Trolls and indie developers delete each other’s mods from the platform.

Source: Steam