August 2025 Changes to Steam’s User Review Scores
On August 18, 2025, Steam announced exciting changes to Steam User Review Scores that highlight the importance of localization for releases on the platform.
Steam added user reviews over 10 years ago, allowing players to share their sentiments on Steam pages and helping others with purchasing decisions. Once a game has received 10 reviews, Steam will automatically generate a User Review Score that ranges from ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ to ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’, with various grades in between, summarizing whether reviews “Recommended” or “Not Recommended” the title.
Since the feature’s launch, Steam has made various changes such as excluding reviews that received the game for free and implementing time-based summaries which you can still see on Steam today.
New Localized Review Features
This week’s announcement focuses on a new way of summarizing User Review Scores based on the users’ primary language.
Until now, Steam’s overall review scores were summarizing reviews received in all languages (even including languages that the game doesn’t support) and creating an overall rating. While providing a global sentiment is useful, many issues that players may mention in reviews can be exclusive to singular languages.
As Steam stated in their announcement:
“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. “ - https://store.steampowered.com...
While many issues we encounter in games are universal, it’s been easy for Steam User Review Scores to be noticeably swayed by poor localizations or other language/region-specific problems.
Now, Steam will instead be showing User Review Scores summarized from reviews in the users’ primary language. For example, English users will now see a Review Score based only on English reviews. It will still be possible for users to see language-agnostic ratings if preferred, but this will have to be set in their user settings.
The biggest departure from the current system is that Localized Review Scores will require 2,000 public, visible reviews for the game, with at least 200 in the language being summarized. This is notably more than the 10 reviews required for the standard Overall Review Score, which Steam explains as:
“this is because we wanted to be pretty confident in the language-specific score before showing it to users.” -https://store.steampowered.com...
What does this mean for Localization?
How exactly this affects games will need to be seen in practice; however, it does have interesting connotations for the importance of localization.
Some may see this change as ‘silo-ing’ languages away from each other, allowing poor localizations to not effect English and other language ratings. Some may argue that this increases the focus on the most popular languages, like English and Simplified Chinese.
However, from what Steam have shown it appears to actually increase the importance of localization. Essentially, there’s now no way of hiding a poor localization.
While previously, poor reviews from a single or small selection of languages could be rendered irrelevant due to strong reviews in other languages, increasing Overall Review Scores. Now, all users will directly know what players in their language think, meaning that if a localization is poor, or cultural sensitivities aren’t respected, players will see that directly reflected in the User Review Score on Steam.
This makes a quality localization more important than ever. There’s no way of buoying reviews with other languages or only caring about your English-language release. Every language you’re supporting will need to be localized with care and respect for the target region or language. It’s never been more important to plan your localization thoroughly and ensure a strong release in every single language you’re supporting.