Reading Steam reviews right: five traps in the same API
Project Zomboid read 40% in Chinese on 100 recent reviews, 86.1% across all 29,030. Sample size, purchase route and review length can each flip a Steam rating.
Posts tagged “reviews”
15 posts
Counter-Strike 2: 9.9 million reviews, veterans are the harshest
By language and by hours played, queried 2026-09-13: Russian is the largest language at 82.1%; positive rate falls from 96.5% under two hours to 69.2% past 500.
Dawnwalker: Russian Steam reviews gained ground, Japanese did not
Eleven days after launch, Russian Steam reviews for The Blood of Dawnwalker tripled and rose 16 points, closing most of the gap we flagged at launch.
Tarkov's language gap is still about servers, not culture
All-time Steam totals re-queried 2026-09-13: Simplified Chinese sits at 23.3% against English's 62.4%. Seven languages pool near 28%, the rest near 60%.
Mistfall Hunter: Traditional Chinese now trails Russian
All-time Steam totals re-queried 2026-09-13: Traditional Chinese is now lowest at 34.4%, Russian at 40.3%, Portuguese (BR) leads at 69.7%.
Project Zomboid's Chinese-English review gap, re-measured
Steam's full appreviews totals put Chinese at 86.1% positive and English at 93.5% positive — a 7.4-point gap, not the 44 points one small sample implied.
Six games' Steam reviews: complaints, language, hours
Six games, re-queried 2026-09-13. Leading complaints mostly differ, Tarkov's language gap runs 39 points, and X4 swings 68 points from first hours to best.
Tarkov reviews: 200 hours is still the dip, sample or not
1,000 recent Steam reviews, re-queried 2026-09-13, plus the original 1,200-review bucket set. The median review is 33 characters; the 200-hour dip holds.
Songs of Syx reviews: flat everywhere, and the interface is why
900 fresh reviews by playtime, 1,200 by month. No playtime band drops below 86%, but June — the month V71 launched — is still the low point.
Corsair Cove: most reviewers are done, and still positive
1,500 reviews re-pulled six weeks in. 68% of reviewers have stopped playing and rate it 80.5%; Simplified Chinese still trails English by 14 points.
X4 reviews: playtime, language and the June 9.00 dip, in one page
X4 reads 22.9% positive under two hours, 90.5% past two hundred. German is the second-largest review language, and June, when 9.00 shipped, was the worst month.
Mistfall Hunter reviews: the dip past 50 hours held up
1,000 recent Steam reviews, re-queried 2026-09-13: approval keeps falling past 50 hours, down to 25.8% over 100 hours, and the key-versus-store gap has closed.
Project Zomboid reviews: newcomers, not veterans, are unhappy
1,500 fresh Steam reviews by playtime and language. New players under 2 hours score 40% positive; Chinese-language reviews trail their own average by 17 points.
Corsair Cove launch reviews vs. patches: a 500-review sample
Keyword counts from a 500-review Steam sample lined up against Corsair Cove's five post-launch patches by date, with sample-size caveats and no causal claims.
Mistfall Hunter roadmap: what shipped vs. what was promised
Every roadmap and DevNote promise, checked through 9 September 2026 against actual patch notes, plus what a 100-review sample says split the Mixed rating.