Valve has seriously altered the way Steam user reviews work with an August 18 update that makes games with over 2,000 public reviews – at least 200 of them written in the same language – receive automatically calculated, language-specific ratings.
You'll now be shown language-specific review scores for qualifying games instead of the swirl of overwhelming positives and negatives that Steam's Overall Review Scores typically present. Steam writes in a news post that says the point of this change is to "better distill the sentiment" of particular cultural groups who may take issue with things like, for example, localization options or network stability, and "better serve potential customers that belong to those groups."
Though, it's difficult not to associate Steam's update with recent unfortunate events, like the flood of negative reviews in Chinese for Soulslike Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, or, from earlier this summer, the time Helldivers 2 got nuked by over 2,600 players – seemingly, mostly Chinese – frustrated with its latest intergalactic war. But Valve does not explicitly mention anything like review bombs in its news post.
"We realize that whenever we make changes to User Reviews, we're inviting some scrutiny into our motivations for making those changes," the developer admits. "Maintaining trust in the system is crucial to us, so we've erred on the side of being as transparent as possible. To that end, we've built many features in User Reviews that can be enabled or disabled, letting you access the raw reviews in many different ways.
"At the same time, we want User Reviews to be useful to customers from the very start, [...] – this is the primary reason why the new language-specific review score system is turned on by default."
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