3 and a half years after launch, the Epic Games Store is getting user ratings

Epic Games has been pushing its PC store front hard, trying to cement itself at least as a comfortable second place behind the PC giant that is Steam. Epic has slowly been improving its store front with a shopping cart, wishlist feature and more. 3 and a half years after its launch, the storefront is finally getting user ratings as well as polls – though their implementation is interesting.

Making the announcement on their blog, Epic Games’ Craig Pearson said “We’ve just updated the Epic Games Store with a new feature we know players have been waiting for—Ratings and Polls.”

These new additions are said to “allow players to provide direct feedback to the Epic Games Store community for the games they’re playing,” with responses populating the store product pages “with information about games and apps, creating a better experience and helping players find games they’re more likely to love.”

The ratings system will ask random players following a 2 hour session to rate the game out of 5 stars. Users being unable to manually rate a game is a purposeful tactic by Epic Games to “protect games from review bombing and ensure people assigning scores are actual players of the games.”

The polling system will likewise only be offered to players at random, though they will ask a much wider variety of questions, ranging from “Is this game good to play with a group?” to “How challenging are the bosses in this game?”

These polls and ratings will then be collated and used across the Epic Games Store, generating tags which can be used to filter games across the site, with Pearson saying “Over time, these tags will also populate our Category pages, and will be used to generate custom tag-based categories driven by our players that will appear on the Epic Games Store home page.”

Epic’s decision to focus on random respondents is an interesting one. Review bombing has been used in the past for both good and bad, and so it will be interesting to see how different user reviews look like on the Epic Games Store compared to other store fronts. We will have to wait and see.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of this new system? Do you prefer it? Is review bombing a net-positive or net-negative? Let us know down below.

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