Steam Makes A Big Change To How Review Scores Are Calculated

Valve is overhauling how Steam reviews are displayed in a new update, it announced on Monday. The percentage score usually assigned to games based on the number of positive and negative user reviews will now exclude reviews written in other languages. The change comes as Steam becomes an increasingly popular global PC storefront and routine review-bombing from players in specific regions can torpedo a game’s rating for everyone on the platform.

“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 in a new 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.”

Not every game will be impacted by the changes. Valve said it will only start calculating “language-specific review scores” for games with at least 2,000 total publicly visible user reviews, and at least 200 written in a particular language. Players can now click through the review score section of a game’s Steam store page to get a breakdown of the scores across different languages. While this will now be the default mode for review scores on Steam, everyone will still have the option to toggle back to the old system.

“We realize that whenever we make changes to User Reviews, we’re inviting some scrutiny into our motivations for making those changes,” Valve wrote. “Maintaining trust in the system is crucial to us, so we’ve erred on the side of being as transparent as possible.”

The move comes just days after one of Steam’s bigger releases of the season, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, implemented controversial changes to the game following apparent pushback from some Chinese fans over historical references in the fictional Soulslike. While it’s unclear if that game factored into this new policy at all, games on Steam increasingly get review-bombed for all sorts of reasons that don’t always necessarily have to do with the underlying functionality or experience, from allegations of using generative AI to complaints of terms of service requirements in places like Europe.

Data from Simon Carless’ Game Discover newsletter earlier this year showed that a plurality of Steam users in 2024 had “simplified Chinese” as their primary language on the platform, followed narrowly by English in second place. Over the summer, Helldivers 2 was briefly review-bombed after an apparent translation error led Chinese players to feel cheated by one of the game’s weekly mission objectives. The latest changes to review scores seem like an attempt by Valve to keep those two audiences separate, at least when it comes to rating new games.