Localization, Platforms, Hardware, Timing. (37/46)
Localization - even though Steam recently updated displayed reviews to show the selected language (which helps for English-speaking people, for example, sort out Chinese localization problems), different language/culture perception still influences overall perception of the game, because of deep social interconnectivity of the modern world. We will have a big research covering this topic separately. Steam is not the only PC gaming platform - things like Roblox exist, hitting reportedly ~ 40m CCU, which, even if it is lower by 2-5 times, is still a huge portion of players, compared to Steam's ~40m CCU, that we are missing from our "analysis". Hardware - sometimes, not that often, we see how a specific combination of PC parts can lead to terrible performance, and you probably know at least one popular example if this - 12th gen of Intel's CPU had some compatibility issues, and 13-14th had poor OS scheduling support, which eventually were fixed, but some players could post a negative review because of poor performance, or even ignoring the game on release, because he was aware of potential problems of the hardware side, leading to a "less impactful" launch for the game. Release timings - apparently, you can get drastically worse sales if you launch at a specific month or day of the week. Reasons involve things like holidays, sales, competitor releases, platform specific behavior, target audience specific behavior, and so on. In the end, again, we see distortion along this axis, which can be easily ignored. AI Storm that is approaching - rapid acceleration of production and development, and automated reviewing/searching/commenting agents - unprecedented, yet still to fully come, we're gonna touch this in detailed example below. And many more honestly, impact of some are harder to estimate, of others can be easier. Eventually we will be covering each of the factors separately in other articles, and build tools for that, but for now let's just consider them as "factors" and not focus on them too much.
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