The review score for some games is now language-specific
I know I’m late to the party but I just found out and didn’t find a post regarding this
TL;DR: Steam now calculates review scores based on reviews made on your languages only (if enough). This is on by default, but can be reverted to go back to review scores based on all reviews (from people that purchased the game directly on Steam only)
Perfect for reviews like “Game is great, visuals are great, no bugs, it’s very fun, but the developer was not polite enough to the glorious Chinese Communist Party, and was a week late on providing a Chinese translation. Never support these xenophobes.”
God I wish I was exaggerating. Chinese gamers seem to have a huge victim complex.
That’s the vibe I get from Lemmygrad too, like they assume the rest of the world is constantly pondering how much they hate China, as a dominating thought.
It’s bizarre, and I am by no means generalizing Chinese people either. Some researchers I’ve interacted with (which is pretty much my only other exposure to China) are not like that at all.
Tbh I very rarely see anyone mention cryptocurrency. I guess if it’s brought up I’ll see someone complain about it, but it’s almost never brought up in the first place. Especially compared to AI which is talked about as often as politics.
Full disclosure, I will sometimes cry about cryptocurrency stuff or slop. But I mined a bitcoin many moons ago, too! And I’m quantizing an LLM as I type!
To be fair there isn’t a lot of use for cryptocurrencies for legitimate purposes for 99% of people. Given its niche use case it’s talked about an awful lot.
I’ve been in countries whose economies are so bad that you need 10,000 of the local currency to buy a loaf of bread. Even they don’t use cryptocurrencies, they just deal with it or they use the US dollar unofficially.
People paying everything by card won’t be interested anyways, and that’s a LOT of people
I’ve heard that in countries with bad economy there’s still some usage, but nothing incredible
I’ve met people who are in those types of countries and they told me they mainly hold crypto to avoid the enormous inflation of their currency, and pay with it or exchange when they want to spend it. Basically an alternative to exchanging fiat to another fiat
I don’t seem to have this problem as much. That said, I didn’t on Reddit either. Maybe it is because my feeds are mostly science, weird maps, and things discovered on lemmy.nsfw.
They really don’t seem to understand that for most of the world we don’t care about China one way or the other. Much in the same way as I don’t really think about Argentina. It’s out there somewhere, but other than acknowledging its existence I don’t really care.
What if I actually want to see the review bombing and it’s effect before buying the product ?
Really, the more I think about this change, the less convincing it is. It will hide review bombing of games that might have warn you of something… I think it will just muddy and make the Steam score way harder to assess and use.
Steam already marked review bombing as off-topic before, which don’t factor into the score by default, and you have to specifically select to see them.
You can disable this language filter, along with the off-topic filter (you should be able to disable them separately though, which you can’t currently).
It’s worth adding that you can disable this filter permanently. It’s not a thing you temporarily disable while you’re on a specific game’s store page; if you disable it, it disables it for every game until you turn it back on. So that’s nice.
As far as I can tell, it just uses whatever language you use Steam in. If that language doesn’t have enough reviews, it defaults to all languages.
I also just tried and set German as a secondary language, but it still just shows the score for English reviews. It doesn’t even mention German at the bottom of the page, where you get the summary, only all languages and English (and recent). If I change the language for the store, it also changes the source for the review score.
The actual reviews at the bottom of the page (Most Helpful and Recent) are pulled from the languages you’ve allowed, so I now see English and German reviews (and a Korean one, but maybe that user just uses Steam in English, but posted the review in Korean?).
So they’re not actually checking the review for the language used. So they must be storing a tag with the review as to what language that reviewers steam is set to. I can see problems with this right there, a lot of people will have steam in whatever their desired language is, say German, but will post reviews in English. It seems like these reviews won’t be taken into account because they’ll be incorrectly tagged as German.
The thing you’re describing definitely happens. Just did a quick check with Steam in German and every game had a few reviews in English (just checking the preview of Most Helpful and Most Recent at the bottom of the store page). Other languages are more affected, like Swedish, where most of the reviews are in English.
I don’t really see a good solution to this. If Steam is able to correctly detect the language and only show your native one, most of the time you’ll probably end up with a handful of reviews, and then Steam has to show you something else (probably English) anyway. I think currently it’s good enough, since you still get the perspective of someone from (probably) your regional or cultural background, even if the language might not fit.
I kinda hope they also weight reviews based in hours in the game. If ten people with 1000 hours I’m a fame recommend and 1000 people with <10 hours don’t recommend, I really hope the score is better than 50%.
What is „my language“? Because depending on where the game is from this changes. Have they thought of that? Because I know from experience that US companies cannot comprehend speaking more than one language.
I mean yeah and that‘s very unfortunate. Users need more control over these things. This is as rushed as Youtube‘s automatic translation slop. Most people speak more than one language. When will Americans learn that?
Steam review scores are more robust than what 20 games critics thought about a game and is more resistant to review bombing than metacritic. The score is not meaningless IMO.
Print media is basically dead here in Australia, though I did just discover Edge is apparently still a thing - I adored that publication back in the pre-WoW days.
I dunno how useful that would be. Way back in the day eg. youtube had a star rating system for videos, and users gave 0-5 stars… except they found out that overwhelmingly vast majority of users only used 0 and 5, nothing in between.
While a more granular review system would be nice, it’s just the users that don’t and won’t use it properly. Even if some users would use scores other than [min] and [max], they would be such a droplet in an ocean.
Even with the current thumbs up/down people get it wrong. Give it a thumbs up but write a scathing review.
Even with the current thumbs up/down people get it wrong. Give it a thumbs up but write a scathing review.
I’ve done that and it’s a result of not having more options than good/bad. Always the same cause: I really wanted to write a 3* review for a game that has a lot to praise but its core is fundamentally flawed, but Steam doesn’t let me give a 3*, so I try to correct for the review score bracket I think the game should be in.
Letterboxd and Goodreads both use a star rating system in addition to long-form reviews and it seems to work out great. I have my disagreements with how the sites are run, but the rating system isn’t one of them.
YouTube star ratings never included the opportunity to review (in text) a specific video, so I think your comparison isn’t very applicable or helpful in this specific situation. The Steam review system isn’t very analogous to how YouTube used to work.
fair enough, youtube probably wasn’t a good comparison, but GOG should be. They have written text alongside the 1-5 star review. Now, there are grades 2-4, but in general 1 and 5 seem to be the most used ones.
Why do you think the scores are useless? They are good starting point and/or a way to evaluate smaller indie titles that often don’t get professional reviews.
I just haven’t seen any correlation with game quality. A short subjective rant from a random gamer is much more useful, especially with those hidden indie gems.
I personally don’t look forward to this new feature. I dont want my local language to be used. And that will be one more program that will constantly nag me about if I want to translate some review or only shows the one in my language by default.
I just want to use my currency and being able to just speak English.
I dont want steam to become like Firefox and decide for you that you do need some translations for stuff…
Since I dont think the language you speak should have any relevancy to the quality of the game I have no interest for reviews that are not in English.
So I just hope this “let’s localize for you everything” trend will stop.
I dont want french reviews of French games made in france. I just want English reviews of games and the score for all reviews.
Currently the localization of the reviews is the thing that I dislike the most with steam which goes to show how good I think the product is.
It really sounds like you’ve misunderstood what this change is actually doing. This isn’t steam forcing you to use a particular language, those settings aren’t going anywhere. It’s also not going to force you to see reviews in the game’s native language either, so your worry about “french reviews of French games made in france” is just… wrong. What it’s doing is sorting reviews by language, under the idea that reviews written in the language you use are probably more relevant to you. And if even that is unacceptable, you can disable the whole system to keep it just the way it is.
This actually means you’re MORE likely to get reviews that are more accurate. First, because it limits the impact of regional review bombing. Now if a game upsets one particular population, their review bombing doesn’t render the whole score meaningless. It’s worth pointing out, games have been heavily review bombed for the sin of competing with, or beating, other regionally popular games for awards. It also means that if the content of a game hits better, or worse, for a demographic based on language, that will be reflected here. If the game is getting rave reviews where it was made, but the translations and voice work for YOUR localization are terrible, you will see reviews that reflect that. You probably don’t care how great the voice acting was in the native Chinese version if you only speak English, and what may seem culturally brilliant to a Japanese audience may lose a lot of the impact for you.
I just want to use my currency and being able to just speak English.
What it’s doing is sorting reviews by language, under the idea that reviews written in the language you use are probably more relevant to you.
It already did that, but only when viewing reviews. The update just makes it so that the score ex: “overwhelmingly positive” is now only based on reviews of your language
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Perfect for reviews like “Game is great, visuals are great, no bugs, it’s very fun, but the developer was not polite enough to the glorious Chinese Communist Party, and was a week late on providing a Chinese translation. Never support these xenophobes.”
God I wish I was exaggerating. Chinese gamers seem to have a huge victim complex.
Yeah.
That’s the vibe I get from Lemmygrad too, like they assume the rest of the world is constantly pondering how much they hate China, as a dominating thought.
It’s bizarre, and I am by no means generalizing Chinese people either. Some researchers I’ve interacted with (which is pretty much my only other exposure to China) are not like that at all.
lemmy.ml, blahaj.zone, lemmygrad, hexbear…
And the entire rest of lemmy is full of people crying about AI or cryptocurrency
Tbh I very rarely see anyone mention cryptocurrency. I guess if it’s brought up I’ll see someone complain about it, but it’s almost never brought up in the first place. Especially compared to AI which is talked about as often as politics.
Doesn’t make it less annoying
Full disclosure, I will sometimes cry about cryptocurrency stuff or slop. But I mined a bitcoin many moons ago, too! And I’m quantizing an LLM as I type!
there sure are many crypto scams, but I hate people generalizing it to all cryptos
To be fair there isn’t a lot of use for cryptocurrencies for legitimate purposes for 99% of people. Given its niche use case it’s talked about an awful lot.
I’ve been in countries whose economies are so bad that you need 10,000 of the local currency to buy a loaf of bread. Even they don’t use cryptocurrencies, they just deal with it or they use the US dollar unofficially.
Sadly, indeed
People paying everything by card won’t be interested anyways, and that’s a LOT of people
I’ve heard that in countries with bad economy there’s still some usage, but nothing incredible
I’ve met people who are in those types of countries and they told me they mainly hold crypto to avoid the enormous inflation of their currency, and pay with it or exchange when they want to spend it. Basically an alternative to exchanging fiat to another fiat
I don’t seem to have this problem as much. That said, I didn’t on Reddit either. Maybe it is because my feeds are mostly science, weird maps, and things discovered on lemmy.nsfw.
if you don’t participate a lot, or don’t have potentially controversial opinions, it won’t happen as much and won’t be noticeable
They really don’t seem to understand that for most of the world we don’t care about China one way or the other. Much in the same way as I don’t really think about Argentina. It’s out there somewhere, but other than acknowledging its existence I don’t really care.
Good for stuff like Chinese review bombing.
I feel like it’s also a way to limit review bombing, like what happened for recent games regarding privacy policy changes
I’m not a fan of it
EDIT: Did you change your comment? I think it wasn’t like this, because my answer doesn’t make sense
https://www.thegamer.com/wuchang-fallen-feathers-review-bomb-censorship-update-changes-patch/
Could be from stuff akin to this. This is the second bombing of Wuchang, first was post-launch due to UE5 spec demands
…were those reviews from some specific languages?
I believe they often start in english only. This might limit the impact for non-english speakers
What if I actually want to see the review bombing and it’s effect before buying the product ?
Really, the more I think about this change, the less convincing it is. It will hide review bombing of games that might have warn you of something… I think it will just muddy and make the Steam score way harder to assess and use.
Steam already marked review bombing as off-topic before, which don’t factor into the score by default, and you have to specifically select to see them.
You can disable this language filter, along with the off-topic filter (you should be able to disable them separately though, which you can’t currently).
It’s worth adding that you can disable this filter permanently. It’s not a thing you temporarily disable while you’re on a specific game’s store page; if you disable it, it disables it for every game until you turn it back on. So that’s nice.
I personally like seeing review bombing as well, it was always relevant to me, despite what Steam says
It’s definitely because of that.
I like it, but currently I see two possible improvements, that I hope get added down the line.
First, being able to give a list of languages you want to factor into the score, so it’s not just your current Steam language.
Second, I’d like the toggle to disable the language filter and off-topic review filter to be separate.
Both are pretty minor for me, since I think the default settings are fine, but giving people more options is better.
I think it currently chooses the languages you’ve allowed to see for reviews if I remember correctly, or the game languages you allowed to see
As far as I can tell, it just uses whatever language you use Steam in. If that language doesn’t have enough reviews, it defaults to all languages.
I also just tried and set German as a secondary language, but it still just shows the score for English reviews. It doesn’t even mention German at the bottom of the page, where you get the summary, only all languages and English (and recent). If I change the language for the store, it also changes the source for the review score.
The actual reviews at the bottom of the page (Most Helpful and Recent) are pulled from the languages you’ve allowed, so I now see English and German reviews (and a Korean one, but maybe that user just uses Steam in English, but posted the review in Korean?).
So they’re not actually checking the review for the language used. So they must be storing a tag with the review as to what language that reviewers steam is set to. I can see problems with this right there, a lot of people will have steam in whatever their desired language is, say German, but will post reviews in English. It seems like these reviews won’t be taken into account because they’ll be incorrectly tagged as German.
The thing you’re describing definitely happens. Just did a quick check with Steam in German and every game had a few reviews in English (just checking the preview of Most Helpful and Most Recent at the bottom of the store page). Other languages are more affected, like Swedish, where most of the reviews are in English.
I don’t really see a good solution to this. If Steam is able to correctly detect the language and only show your native one, most of the time you’ll probably end up with a handful of reviews, and then Steam has to show you something else (probably English) anyway. I think currently it’s good enough, since you still get the perspective of someone from (probably) your regional or cultural background, even if the language might not fit.
Isn’t this already the case?
Unless there’s a setting I missed, right now you can only change both settings at the same time.
Oops, my bad then, I didn’t test the feature yet, only read the blog post and thought “off topic” reviews didn’t change
you’re late to the party
I kinda hope they also weight reviews based in hours in the game. If ten people with 1000 hours I’m a fame recommend and 1000 people with <10 hours don’t recommend, I really hope the score is better than 50%.
Well maybe they stopped playing the game because they didn’t like it? I don’t continue to play games I dislike
What is „my language“? Because depending on where the game is from this changes. Have they thought of that? Because I know from experience that US companies cannot comprehend speaking more than one language.
Its the language set for your client UI I wager.
I mean yeah and that‘s very unfortunate. Users need more control over these things. This is as rushed as Youtube‘s automatic translation slop. Most people speak more than one language. When will Americans learn that?
Steam reviews are a great source of info and entertainment. The score is absolutely useless.
When actually picking my next game I’ve trusted the same gaming magazine for over 30 years.
Steam review scores are more robust than what 20 games critics thought about a game and is more resistant to review bombing than metacritic. The score is not meaningless IMO.
Which magazine? I’m legitimately surprised that (m)any have survived, to be honest!
Pelit. I don’t know how old it is but the above one was the first issue I bought. One of the original dudes still there making up terrible wordplays.
That’s awesome to see!
Print media is basically dead here in Australia, though I did just discover Edge is apparently still a thing - I adored that publication back in the pre-WoW days.
The score is useful. It could be better if Steam had a proper review system instead of just “good” or “bad”
I dunno how useful that would be. Way back in the day eg. youtube had a star rating system for videos, and users gave 0-5 stars… except they found out that overwhelmingly vast majority of users only used 0 and 5, nothing in between.
While a more granular review system would be nice, it’s just the users that don’t and won’t use it properly. Even if some users would use scores other than [min] and [max], they would be such a droplet in an ocean.
Even with the current thumbs up/down people get it wrong. Give it a thumbs up but write a scathing review.
I’ve done that and it’s a result of not having more options than good/bad. Always the same cause: I really wanted to write a 3* review for a game that has a lot to praise but its core is fundamentally flawed, but Steam doesn’t let me give a 3*, so I try to correct for the review score bracket I think the game should be in.
Letterboxd and Goodreads both use a star rating system in addition to long-form reviews and it seems to work out great. I have my disagreements with how the sites are run, but the rating system isn’t one of them.
YouTube star ratings never included the opportunity to review (in text) a specific video, so I think your comparison isn’t very applicable or helpful in this specific situation. The Steam review system isn’t very analogous to how YouTube used to work.
fair enough, youtube probably wasn’t a good comparison, but GOG should be. They have written text alongside the 1-5 star review. Now, there are grades 2-4, but in general 1 and 5 seem to be the most used ones.
I would argue against this. I have seen more diverse rating, but 1 to 5 still isn’t really accurate
GOG also has a massive problem: you can’t edit your review once you published it
Also, you watch multiple youtube videos in a day. You play a few games or watch a few movies or series a month, and probably fewer
I’ve never understood those reviews
They don’t want to hurt some dev’s numbers, but they don’t like the game either.
Or they just can’t handle giving the thumbs down. A lot of people like that nowadays. Only likes are allowed.
Sometimes it’s the opposite, bad review but positive message
Why do you think the scores are useless? They are good starting point and/or a way to evaluate smaller indie titles that often don’t get professional reviews.
I just haven’t seen any correlation with game quality. A short subjective rant from a random gamer is much more useful, especially with those hidden indie gems.
I personally don’t look forward to this new feature. I dont want my local language to be used. And that will be one more program that will constantly nag me about if I want to translate some review or only shows the one in my language by default.
I just want to use my currency and being able to just speak English.
I dont want steam to become like Firefox and decide for you that you do need some translations for stuff…
Since I dont think the language you speak should have any relevancy to the quality of the game I have no interest for reviews that are not in English.
So I just hope this “let’s localize for you everything” trend will stop.
I dont want french reviews of French games made in france. I just want English reviews of games and the score for all reviews.
Currently the localization of the reviews is the thing that I dislike the most with steam which goes to show how good I think the product is.
It really sounds like you’ve misunderstood what this change is actually doing. This isn’t steam forcing you to use a particular language, those settings aren’t going anywhere. It’s also not going to force you to see reviews in the game’s native language either, so your worry about “french reviews of French games made in france” is just… wrong. What it’s doing is sorting reviews by language, under the idea that reviews written in the language you use are probably more relevant to you. And if even that is unacceptable, you can disable the whole system to keep it just the way it is.
This actually means you’re MORE likely to get reviews that are more accurate. First, because it limits the impact of regional review bombing. Now if a game upsets one particular population, their review bombing doesn’t render the whole score meaningless. It’s worth pointing out, games have been heavily review bombed for the sin of competing with, or beating, other regionally popular games for awards. It also means that if the content of a game hits better, or worse, for a demographic based on language, that will be reflected here. If the game is getting rave reviews where it was made, but the translations and voice work for YOUR localization are terrible, you will see reviews that reflect that. You probably don’t care how great the voice acting was in the native Chinese version if you only speak English, and what may seem culturally brilliant to a Japanese audience may lose a lot of the impact for you.
This change was made with you in mind.
It already did that, but only when viewing reviews. The update just makes it so that the score ex: “overwhelmingly positive” is now only based on reviews of your language
What.
This updated doing exactly what you want it to do, what do you complaining about?
Yeah, it should be off by default with the option to turn it on.