Valve announce language-specific user review scores for Steam games

Valve have carefully tweaked the user review system for Steam games, to now include language-specific user review scores.

This new system is on by default for all Steam users, however Valve said they realise changes will bring scrutiny and so there is a dedicated setting to disable it. If you do disable it, your Steam account will go back to seeing the overall review score from all languages posting Steam reviews.

Why have they done this? As Valve explained, they've grown a lot into having a massive global presence from users from all difference regions. Some games may have translation issues, specific cultural references and so on. Valve feel this language-based review score will help to capture these issues and that "Calculating a language-specific review score means that we can better distil the sentiment of these different groups of customers, and in doing so, better serve potential customers that belong to those groups".

Keeping it all rather transparent, there's a whole new language breakdown section for Steam reviews you can click to open. At the top of the reviews section is this now:

And when you open the language breakdown you'll get to see the overall score as well:

Source: Valve