Language-based game ratings now available on Steam

Steam is changing its game rating system. Now, for some projects, the rating will take into account the user's language. This will help combat massive negative reviews from certain regions.

From now on, if a game has enough reviews in a particular language, Steam will calculate a separate rating for that language. This means that the rating may differ for different languages and from the overall rating. Reviews by language will be enabled by default.

The changes will affect games with more than 2,000 reviews and at least 200 reviews written in a specific language. If a particular project meets the necessary criteria, Steam users will be able to see the following distribution of reviews:

This change is especially important, given that very often users from certain regions, such as China or Russia, can massively downgrade a game not because of its quality, but for cultural, political, or other reasons. For example, this was the case with Overwatch 2, which, despite already having many negative reviews, fell victim to review bombing by angry Chinese players.