How to Fish score shifts by language: 90% to 98%

31 August 2026 · 4 min read

GameMapa editorial · how we check facts
Checked: Claude (AI) — fact-checked against the Ukrainian original; not proofread by a native speaker

We opened the How to Fish store page sixteen times in a row, changing only the interface language, and recorded the score Steam displayed. Same game, same moment — and the number ranges from 90% to 98%, with only 7 of 16 languages seeing the top badge.

The reason is stated by Steam itself, in the third line of the tooltip: by default the score is calculated only from reviews written in your language.

The full table: 16 languages, one moment

All rows were captured in a single catalogue pass on 31 August 2026, so they are from the same moment.

Latin American Spanish: 98%, but no top badge

The most interesting row. LatAm Spanish shows 98% positive — tied for the highest — yet reads Muy positivas, that is “Very Positive”, not “Overwhelmingly Positive”.

The reason is that Steam also applies a review-count threshold, not just a percentage one. Our data brackets it: the largest sample that did not get the top badge at ≥95% is 203 reviews (LatAm), and the smallest that did is 682 (French). So the threshold sits somewhere between 204 and 682 reviews. Our measurements do not pin it down further, and we are not going to invent a number.

Two languages where Steam gave up

Italian and Swedish both show 38,946 reviews and 94% — the identical figure. That is not an Italian or Swedish score; it is the all-languages score Steam fell back to because there were too few reviews in those languages.

You can spot such a case from the tooltip itself: 14 of the languages include a third sentence saying the score is computed from reviews in your language. Italian and Swedish have no third sentence at all. That is how we found them.

One caveat: 38,946 is close to, but not identical with, the 38,705 we separately pulled from the API as the total number of Steam-purchase reviews. We did not reconcile the 241-review difference — the readings are from different moments.

What this means for a buyer

• The score on a store page is not a property of the game but of the pair “game + your language”. Change the interface language and the number changes.
• The fewer reviews in your language, the noisier the score. 231 reviews and 15,660 reviews carry the same-looking badge with very different reliability.
• To see the all-languages score, switch the review filter on the store page to “all languages”. How to Fish globally that day: 43,902 reviews, badge “Very Positive” — a step below what an English-speaking player sees.

What we are not claiming

We do not know why Italian and Swedish specifically lost their own score — Steam does not explain it and we did not measure the switch-over threshold. We do not claim Ukrainian players rate the game worse: 231 reviews cannot support that. And we did not test whether the same thresholds apply to other games — every number here is one game at one moment.