This week, Steam has implemented new changes to the way it displays review scores to its users. These changes have now resulted in sudden overnight score boosts to titles like Palworld, Balatro, and Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, which have, in some cases, hit thresholds to upgrade their score categories. While these review changes were made to provide users with more information to make informed purchase decisions, could they also incentivize people to list reviews in specific languages to gain more voting power?
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On Monday, Steam announced that it would be changing how it evaluates user reviews around titles, shifting its emphasis towards language-specific averages that would better match the cultural context of what specific users are 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,” said a Steam blog post. “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.”
Now, when Steam users load a game’s store page, instead of seeing a combined total average score at the top, as before, the total review score now will be displayed as an average of reviews for the language the user has selected.
Users can still access the total review score regardless of language, but they need to scroll down to the bottom of the store page listing. This change to how reviews are displayed has resulted in several games going up in score for English-languaged users, one of, if not the most commonly used, language settings on Steam.
The reference to culture in Steam’s blog post was topical, as Wuchang: Fallen Feathers had recently been embroiled in controversy after introducing story and character changes that some players felt were motivated by Chinese backlash to certain cultural elements in the game. While Wuchang: Fallen Feathers sits at a 50% review score when totalling the average from all languages, it now displays a significantly better 69% rating from its English reviews.
It isn’t just games with active controversies that are benefiting from the new review display, either. With these changes, the recently updated Palworld gained enough positive reviews to display as “Overwhelmingly Positive” to its English users, and already highly reviewed games like Balatro received some minor boosts to their score as well.
While this change may help users evaluate games in a way that is more attuned to their cultural contexts, it feels like this methodology could be exploited by those who want to influence a game’s score in a specific language. Will users be tempted to write reviews in English or Chinese instead of their default language to have a greater ability to positively or negatively influence a game’s score for a greater group of Steam users? According to a blog post by game localizer Logrus IT, as of July, English is the dominant language among users on the platform. English users represented 37.7% of those for whom the group had collected data.
Not every game has been positively affected by the change. The heralded Mortal Kombat 1 saw a slight decrease in score with English reviews compared to its total average score. Still, the change is worth keeping in mind for Steam users looking to purchase games, as some scores may be slightly inflated compared to how they were displayed under the old system.
What are your thoughts on the changes to the way Steam is now displaying its review scores? Have you noticed any large rating swings on your favorite games?
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