Games Store Ratings: Epic asks random players to rate games

Games can now be rated on the Epic Games Store. The new ratings appear next to the Open Critic Rating overview. But Epic doesn’t let everyone speak. Only randomly selected players are allowed to pass judgment. After finishing a game, the provider will ask for feedback from the launcher in the future. However, not everyone is asked and not always. The basic requirement is that you have played the game for at least two hours. The selection from this group is then randomized.

Elected persons have the option to rate the title with up to five stars. This approach differs significantly from that of other platforms, where every player always has the option to rate any title. This regularly leads to “review bombing”, giving negative reviews, for example, because of copy protection or statements by the developers. Such judgments would not refer to the fun of the game and therefore not a basis for purchase recommendations, say, providers, although they can certainly be essential for a purchase decision. Stores balance a fine line between their economic interests and those of the developers on the one hand, and the interests of the customers on the other.

For example, in the fight against this phenomenon, Valve has significantly reduced it with a number of measures, including displaying the history of reviews and automatically detecting review bombing. Metacritic, on the other hand, only allows user reviews with a delay. Epic, on the other hand, does not take an open, unregulated approach and approaches the problem from the other side. Player selection is to ensure that only people who actually play the game can rate and there is no “bombing” of bad ratings.

Surveys ask about characteristics

Also, at the end of their sessions, players are randomly presented with polls about their most recently played game. They ask, among other things, whether a title can be played “good in a group” or how challenging bosses are. From the answers, Epic deduces tags that are added to the product page. They should help describe a game’s features in more detail, and over time they will also appear as a category in the store to allow for more accurate searching. In addition, individual categories should be created from tags displayed on the store’s home page. In addition to the verdict, the game’s properties are also randomly requested.