New Steam Review Change is Controversial

Steam‘s new update restricts review scores to the user’s language, hiding international reviews and potentially hurting games with global audiences.

This Steam Review Change is Bad For Some Games

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.

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.

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