Game developer Ruslan «ternox» Salikov, known for the STONKS-9800 project, responded to a study by The Nerd Stash, which analyzed reviews for several popular games on Steam and ranked the countries whose players write the most negative reviews.
Game developer Ruslan «ternox» Salikov, known for the STONKS-9800 project, responded to a study by The Nerd Stash, which analyzed reviews for several popular games on Steam and ranked the countries whose players write the most negative reviews.
In August, Steam updated its review system, which has been on the service for 12 years, allowing gamers to see a rating based on the language of the review.
This was taken advantage of by The Nerd Stash, who analyzed reviews on the pages of 14 of the most popular games on Steam in their study. The list included paid GTA V, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Elden Ring: Nightreign and free Marvel Rivals, Banana, Dota 2, Delta Force, etc.
Their analysis showed that the following languages have the highest percentage of positive reviews:
Instead, the list of the «most toxic», with the lowest percentage of positive reviews, looks like this:
Ruslan Salikov said he decided to conduct his own research because he didn’t like the wording in the media calling Ukrainian gamers toxic, and the strange selection of games in The Nerd Stash’s analysis. According to him, there were Banana and Bongo Cat, which «are not games at all.»
«My other claim is to call nations the „most toxic“ based only on reviews of a random dozen games — a rather strange statement. Toxicity is not necessarily manifested in reviews, players may not like the game and they will write about it — that’s absolutely normal. It’s the presentation in the reviews that makes them toxic, not its positive or negative verdict. The Nerd Stash did not conduct such an analysis,» Salikov told ternox.
In his study, he randomly selected 25 popular paid games and did not include Ukrainian projects in the list to make the sample more representative. He included, in particular, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Baldur’s Gate 3, SILENT HILL 2 (95.06%), Borderlands 4 (62.64%), HELLDIVERS 2 and others.
«My list is not necessarily the best. It’s just a different sample that shows a completely different result and proves that analyzing nations based on their reviews in a small handful of games is pointless,» the developer noted.
In his study, as in The Nerd Stash, Japanese and Chinese were in the top spots, but Ukrainian jumped up to 21st place with 91% positive reviews out of over 20,000 analyzed. Russian came in fifth with 84% positive reviews.
According to Salikov, his research shows that Ukrainian reviews are not even close to being in the top «most toxic.» He also explained that players from Asia are always the most critical of bugs and other problems in games, which is why they have many negative reviews.
«I urge our media outlets to carefully study and verify dubious statistics next time before spreading them, and not to spread theses about the „toxicity“ of Ukrainians,» emphasized the developer of STONKS-9800.
Previously, dev.ua analyzed reviews for STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, which has about 90,000 reviews on Steam, written in 29 languages. The highest percentage of positive reviews are from Ukrainian and Spanish-speaking reviews, and the lowest are from gamers from Asian countries: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
