Now that the option to display language-specific review scores has finally been added to Steam, publishers will have greater insight into how their games are performing in different regions, and possibly which regions to prioritize when it comes to which languages to localize for. In the wake of the update, Shinjisan, a Japanese streamer, made a post on X talking about the “negative review habit” of Japanese people and how it could impact publishers in the future.
“Whichever game I checked, the majority of Japanese reviews were negative,” Shinjisan said in his post. “However, if you actually read what the negative reviews are saying, you’ll see that many of them are surprisingly reasonable.” While acknowledging that there’s nothing wrong with leaving bad reviews, the streamer suggested that many Japanese people only write reviews when they want to complain about a certain aspect of a game, but don’t go out of their way to leave positive reviews on the games they liked. This means that Japanese-specific review scores on Steam will potentially be heavily skewed, representing only people who disliked a title.
“Steam reviews can largely affect how a game sells, and apparently, some developers have started avoiding releasing Japanese language support for games during Early Access or on day-one in order to avoid accumulating bad reviews right off the bat,” Shinjisan suggested (more on whether this is true later in the article). Many other Japanese X users seemed to sympathize with the sentiment and acknowledged the problem. While constructive criticism is important, posting positive reviews can boost the motivation of developers to work harder on the game, another user suggested. The general consensus among Japanese netizens does seem to be that they tend to leave more negative reviews, especially due to cultural factors (a 3 stars rating may be considered “averagely good,” but it does not hold the same connotation in the West), but what do the statistics say about this?
According to user-conducted online research from 2021 and a corresponding data analysis from 2022, there is a tendency for Japanese Steam users to leave significantly more negative reviews compared to users overseas. The research compiled data collected from 262 game titles that had over 100 cumulative reviews from Japanese users. The results suggest that 19.9% of overall negative reviews on Steam account for those made by Japanese users, which is a significantly higher ratio compared to the worldwide average of 11.8%. Another interesting piece of data that showed a much more drastic difference in negative reviews was regarding Dead by Daylight, a game that had the second highest number of worldwide reviews at the time. According to the data, there was around 17% of negative reviews worldwide, while around 45% of them were made by Japanese gamers. But does that actually impact the decision of overseas publishers to localize their games for the Japanese market?
Unfortunately, the aforementioned research does not contain enough data that would prove one or the other, and some users even argue that the theory is unfounded. While it wasn’t research based on hard data, a while ago AUTOMATON scratched the surface of the matter by interviewing 8 different Steam publishers. Responses indicated that some of them were indeed met with more negative reviews from Japanese gamers than others, but most of the publishers did not show any intentions of withholding Japanese language support from their games.
On the other hand, it seems like many Japanese Steam users are anxious about the “problem” of not leaving positive reviews, not only because of the possibility of overseas publishers backing out, but because it may negatively impact domestic developers as well. This is especially true for Japanese indie developers who rely on positive word-of-mouth to boost the visibility of their games. Taking notice of this problem in recent months, many indie devs have been encouraging players to leave short reviews – even if it’s just a single word.
