Why Steam Might Be Showing You ‘English’ Reviews
Steam has made a change to the way that its reviews are displayed, and users are taking notice. While the game platform previously divided game reviews into recent reviews and overall reviews, Steam is now is only showing English-language reviews to many users.
Steam regularly makes tweaks and adjustments to its service in an effort to improve upon it for the userbase. Back in November, Steam overhauled the store page layout, and in 2024, Steam began disclosing what games on the platform utilized AI in their development.
How Steam’s ‘Mark as Private’ Feature Works
Steam has a feature that allows users to mark an individual game as private, allowing for a higher level of nuanced privacy while gaming.
Steam Shows English Reviews Instead of Overall
User reviews are included on nearly every released game on the Steam store, providing any have been left by players. While users can browse through all the reviews, they also get summed up at the top of the page, showing both recent review score averages and all-time averages, at least until fairly recently. Now, the pages will instead show recent reviews and reviews in the user’s language, with the majority of Steam users speaking either English or Simplified Chinese. The change to Steam reviews has concerned some users, though, as reducing every review down to only those left in a single language can skew the review averages.
Why Steam Reviews Changed
Steam explained the reasoning for the change when it made the adjustment back in August 2025. Its reasoning is that the filter now automatically shows Steam reviews in the user’s language because of potential disparities in the experience of a game, depending on the language used. Games with subpar localization, for example, might get slammed in foreign languages because the bad translation has made it more difficult to play. Additionally, users in some regions may take issue with the content of a game that doesn’t bother those elsewhere in the world. As a result, the reviews default to the user’s set language on Steam.
How to Revert Steam Reviews Back to Showing Everything
Thankfully, Steam considered the possibility that users would want to see all reviews left, and the process of doing so is pretty simple.
If someone wants to look at all users’ reviews regardless of language, or they want to see the average across the board, here’s how to do it.
On a Steam store listing for a game, users should see in the right-hand corner that the review listings are set to “Recent Reviews” and a second line for reviews written in the user’s language, like “English Reviews.” To see everything, Steam users should scroll down to the Customer Review section of the page, which can usually be found near the bottom beneath System Requirements, and the Mods and Similar Games carousels. At the top of the customer reviews, a section will display the number of reviews in the user’s local language, recent reviews, and total reviews in all languages, as well as providing an average for each.
If someone wants to actually see the individual reviews in those languages, switching it to display everything is easy. Simply click on the “Language” drop-down, and switch from “Your Languages” to “All Languages.” Alternatively, if a user is interested in only seeing reviews in a specific language, they can also select that one from the list instead, or see a breakdown of the average across the board for a specific language. For example, Team Fortress 2 has over 725,000 English reviews with an average of Very Positive, while it has only 8,000 reviews in Thai, but achieved an Overwhelmingly Positive score on average.
Over the years, Steam has gradually provided more ways to improve a user’s experience to help them find exactly what they’re looking for. In 2025, Steam added accessibility filters that help players find games that suit their needs. A personal calendar feature was also added the same year, which lets players see upcoming games that Steam thinks the player might be interested in, based on their prior games played.