In its never-ending quest to achieve algorithmic nirvana, Valve has updated Steam’s user review scoring system “for some games” to be calculated based on the language in which they were written.
“When there are enough reviews written in a particular language, Steam will calculate a review score for that language,” Valve explained. “The Review Score displayed to users will be based on their primary language. What this means is that some languages may show more positive review scores, while others may show more negative ones, for the same game.”
The language-specific review breakdown will be provided for any game with more than 2,000 public user reviews, at least 200 of which are written in at least one language. Valve said the thresholds are higher than the 10 reviews required to calculate an overall review score “because we wanted to be pretty confident in the language-specific score before showing it to users.”
Of course, this is Steam, and that means you can dive deeper into the numbers if you want to. Hovering the “Language” dropdown in the user reviews menu bar, for instance, will provide a quick-and-dirty breakdown of a game’s rating in every applicable language. This, for instance, is the rating breakdown for The First Descendant, which is very obviously all over the map—”mostly negative” for Simplified Chinese, “very positive” for Portuguese and Dutch.
There’s also a new language-breakdown popup option, which displays basically the same information, but bigger and in color:
The new language-specific review scores are enabled by default—Valve said it wants user reviews to be as useful as possible without requiring users to “twiddle with the many knobs the system has”—but you can switch back to all-languages ratings in your Steam settings if you prefer. As for why it made the change, the simple fact is that Steam has become a global platform, and that means “customers in different regions of the world may have vastly different experiences from each other for the same game.”
“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,” Valve wrote. “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.”
I would observe with a certain note of caution that the value of Steam user reviews is dependent upon them being used in good faith, which is not always the case, and that language-specific review scores could maybe possibly encourage some, let’s say, friendly geopolitical rivalries on the rating scene, as users from one region take issue with the quite obviously incorrect (and maybe even biased) opinions of people in other regions. We’ll see how that works out soon enough, I’m sure.
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