Steam has just rolled out a new update that changed how review scores of certain games are shown to users of the platform.
One of the first things most of us do before purchasing a game on Steam is to check its review score. When you’re about to make a big purchase on a new release, chances are you’d want to see if the game itself is even worth your time.
Without having to read all the reviews one by one, Steam can help save a lot of time, informing you about how well a game is perceived as it instantly lets you know the review score of the title on its store page.
However, things have now changed somewhat. A new update rolled out on August 18, 2025, has given this system an overhaul by introducing language-specific review scores.
According to a blog post from Steam, this change was aimed at “helping customers make informed decisions when considering the purchase of a new game.”
The way it now works is that, for some games, the review score that’s shown to the user will be based on the reviews written in their language. This essentially means that a game can have varying review scores, depending on the language.
“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,” the post reads.
“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.”
This particular change doesn’t apply to all games, but only to those that “have more than 2,000 publicly visible reviews, and with at least 200 written reviews in at least one language.”
It’s also mentioned that the thresholds were made higher than the 10 reviews required to calculate the Overall Review score on purpose, as the company wants to be “confident in the language-specific score before showing it to users.”
Games that have language-specific review scores will have a slightly different interface on the platform, showing reviews in the user’s primary language, recent reviews, and the option to see the language breakdown.
The latter option lets you check out the game’s review score in other languages. By default, Steam’s language-specific review scores are already enabled.
However, if you’d like to switch back to simply seeing the overall review score, you can always tweak the store preferences setting on your account.
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