Steam's position as the premier place to go for PC games has inadvertantly given the platform a lot of influence of the success or failure of each new release.
A big part of that is the user review system, which allows players to offer their overall feedback, as well as a thumbs up or thumbs down rating. This leads to an overall rating displayed on the games store page for both all time and recent reviews, while the system is further secured by showing exactly how many hours the reviewer has in the game
While there are plenty of games that have still been review bombed for various reasons, it's a solid overall approach that helps users make an informed decision before dropping their hard earned money on a new game.
As first reported by Dexerto, a new Steam update has made a significant change to the way reviews will work for some games moving forward. What this change does is essentially show you reviews that were written for the game in your language, supposedly to provide the reviews that would be the most useful to you. There are toggles that can be changed to show all reviews, regardless of language or origin.
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In a blog post, the company explained the decision, saying, "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."
In order to qualify for the new system, games must have 2000 public reviews, with at least 200 written reviews in the same language. The change is live right now, so go and check it out if you're 50/50 on that next potential purchase.
Topics: Steam