Epic Games Store introduces rating system designed to stop review-bombing

pcgamer.com:

The Epic Games Store is improving its functionality over time, and now it's going to wade into the treacherous waters of user reviews. A recent update has added ratings and polls to the store, which players will see at intervals after playing games, and the information gathered here will be used to populate a game's store page with more information about it.

The most notable element of this update is how Epic has designed the functionality around the problem of co-ordinated behaviour. Customer reviews are now as important if not more so than those of professional critics, across many fields, but online dynamics can see them used in unintended ways.

The most striking example of this in the games industry is review-bombing, whereby a game that is seen to have committed some great offense is flooded with negative reviews. The intentions are of course impossible to tease-out with group behaviour like this, but certainly elements of it seem to be making a public spectacle of the target, expressing frustration(opens in new tab), and ultimately harming sales.

The important thing to remember about review-bombing is that it can happen for the most trivial of reasons while in other cases it's because of wider cultural issues. Shadow of the Tomb Raider once got review-bombed, for example, because it got a chunky discount not long after launch(opens in new tab), so people who'd bought it were pissed. On the other end of the scale, the Taiwanese horror game Devotion was review-bombed en masse by Chinese players for including a Winnie the Pooh meme(opens in new tab) (The Chinese Communist Party has declared war on Pooh bear, because of the insinuation president Xi Jinping looks a bit like him).

So user reviews are good, but the