Epic Game Store fights back against review bombs with new user rating system

digitaltrends.com:

People review-bombing games even before they’re released is a common problem on sites like Metacritic. To combat this, Epic Games announced that it’s come out with a new user rating system on the Epic Games Store that should address the issues.

The Fortnite maker said on Friday it updated its digital gaming storefront with the user rating system to ensure its games receive direct feedback from the community as they’re playing them. It works like this: Epic will randomly ask players to score a game on a five-star scale after playing a game for more than two hours. Their scores will be calculated into the game’s overall score, which will appear on the game’s Epic Games Store page to help other gamers determine whether or not it’s worth playing.

Epic says that the randomization process prevents spamming, and it won’t ask players to rate every single game they play. It also wants to make sure that people assigning the scores are actual players instead of bots or people who are giving games low scores based on preliminary game information, such as gameplay footage and bad reviews from critics.

In addition to the rating system, Epic said it will ask players to answer polls after each gaming session. The polls will ask a broad range of questions, such as whether the game is good to play as a team and how challenging the boss fights are, and will be given in the format of “Yes or No” or multiple-choice questions.

Epic will then use the responses from the polls to generate tags for store pages, which will improve discoverability and help people find other games that deserve as much attention as the mainstream ones. The tags will eventually be used to create category pages and custom tag-based categories that will show up on the