I know I’m late to the party but I just found out and didn’t find a post regarding this
TL;DR: Steam now calculates review scores based on reviews made on your languages only (if enough). This is on by default, but can be reverted to go back to review scores based on all reviews (from people that purchased the game directly on Steam only)
Good for stuff like Chinese review bombing.
It’s definitely because of that.
I feel like it’s also a way to limit review bombing, like what happened for recent games regarding privacy policy changes
I’m not a fan of it
EDIT: Did you change your comment? I thought it wasn’t like this, because my answer doesn’t make sense
https://www.thegamer.com/wuchang-fallen-feathers-review-bomb-censorship-update-changes-patch/
Could be from stuff akin to this. This is the second bombing of Wuchang, first was post-launch due to UE5 spec demands
…were those reviews from some specific languages?
I believe they often start in english only. This might limit the impact for non-english speakers
What if I actually want to see the review bombing and it’s effect before buying the product ?
Really, the more I think about this change, the less convincing it is. It will hide review bombing of games that might have warn you of something… I think it will just muddy and make the Steam score way harder to assess and use.
Steam already marked review bombing as off-topic before, which don’t factor into the score by default, and you have to specifically select to see them.
You can disable this language filter, along with the off-topic filter (you should be able to disable them separately though, which you can’t currently).
It’s worth adding that you can disable this filter permanently. It’s not a thing you temporarily disable while you’re on a specific game’s store page; if you disable it, it disables it for every game until you turn it back on. So that’s nice.
I personally like seeing review bombing as well, it was always relevant to me, despite what Steam says