Steam‘s new update restricts review scores to the user’s language, hiding international reviews and potentially hurting games with global audiences. Since 2013, Steam has promoted user reviews as a key customer-friendly feature influencing purchase decisions, but its latest change to the system has raised concerns.
Alongside its primary purpose of letting players score games honestly, Steam’s rating system has also been used to protest developers’ decisions, demand changes, and boycott specific titles. A recent example was when Ready or Not‘s Steam page was review-bombed after the developer decided to censor some of its content ahead of the console release. But that’s just one case, and plenty of other games have faced similar organized pushback from their communities on Valve’s gaming platform.
In an apparent effort to minimize the negative effects of review bombing, Steam has localized its Review Scores for each user. The new system prioritizes reviews in the customer’s language, hiding international scores from the front page. Under the new rules, if a game has over 2,000 public reviews and at least 200 are written in a specific language, the overall score will be localized. This has caused the total review counts of many games to drop significantly, with Black Myth: Wukong being a notable example.
Before Steam’s recent update, Black Myth: Wukong‘s success was evident on its store page, with over 850,000 mostly positive reviews. Many consider these user scores a selling point for the Chinese RPG, encouraging more gamers to buy it. After the update, however, English-speaking users now see only about 64,000 reviews on the store page, which, while still a large number, represents just a fraction of the game’s total international reviews.
It seems that games with a massive international audience may take the biggest hit from Steam’s update. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers and Tale of Immortal are other examples facing the same situation as Black Myth: Wukong, their default review counts have been cut significantly in many regions. Steam argues that localized grading will help users make smarter purchases, likely by showing how a game is performing in their region. However, this could backfire for developers, as thousands of their hard-earned reviews might never be seen by prospective buyers.
Players can still view the non-restricted review scores using the “Language Breakdown” filter, but the default score will be limited to their local language. In the coming days, it will be interesting to see whether Valve’s decision to limit reviews enhances the user experience or causes new pushback amid Steam’s ongoing controversies.
Valve
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Steam is a digital video game storefront and program developed by Valve that allows gamers to purchase, play, and mod their titles all through one convenient program.
