Valve has updated Steam user reviews to be language-specific, to provide a “better indication of user sentiment.”
Valve announced the update in a news post on August 18, 2025, revealing that Steam users will now see user reviews “calculated from the reviews written in your language” for some games as part of an “ongoing effort to ensure that Steam user reviews are helping customers make informed decisions.”
Steam’s user reviews allow players to provide their own review on a game, along with whether they’d recommend it or not.
Prior to this update, Steam would then calculate the total percentage of positive reviews (from across the globe), before assigning the game an overall all reviews score, such as a mostly positive or mixed review score. This overall score would then be displayed in its key information box, above the title’s release date.
However, the update means that users will now see a language-specific review score when there are “more than 2,000 publicly visible reviews, with at least 200 written reviews in at least one language.”
Valve explained in its post that it “purposely made these thresholds higher than the ten reviews required to calculate the overall review score” because it wanted to be “pretty confident in the language-specific score before showing it to users.”
“What this means is that some languages may show more positive review scores, while others may show more negative ones, for the same game,” Valve said.
So, rather than calculating a review score based on all the positive reviews from around the world, by default, Steam now calculates an overall score based on the reviews in your primary language, which is shared where the all reviews score previously was.
For example, in July 2025, The Sims 4’s Steam page displayed a recent reviews score of Very Positive, and an all reviews score of Very Positive. Checking the same page today, however, we see an English reviews score of Very Positive instead of the all reviews score.
“Steam’s growth since then into an even larger global presence means customers in different regions of the world may have vastly different experiences from each other for the same game,” Valve continued.
“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.”
Users can “dig deeper” into which other languages have a score, and a game’s overall global score, by selecting the language breakdown option at the top of the reviews section of a listing page.
While language-specific reviews are enabled by default, Valve has given users the option to revert to the old system in their settings.
“We realize that whenever we make changes to user reviews, we’re inviting some scrutiny into our motivations for making those changes,” Valve explained.
“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.”