The Epic Games Store has slowly been gaining highly requested features over the years since its first inception four years ago. Recent major feature implementations include a shopping cart and achievements. And now, it"s a community rating system for games that"s coming in, though it"s a little different from how other platforms do it. Alongside it there is a new Polls system too.
User ratings for products provide developer feedback and information for prospective customers before they make a purchase to easily read the state of a game. The new system sits on store pages alongside the already available critic ratings powered by OpenCritic.
There is a catch though, not everyone is able to rate a game just because they own it. With the new system, random players who have over two hours of playtime of a game will be offered to rate the experience on a five-star scale. There will be no option to write a review. Once enough data is collected, the overall score will be displayed on the relevant store page for everyone to see.
According to Epic, this serves as a method to both stop review bombings and make sure ratings are authentic:
Because these requests are randomized, we won’t spam our players, and we probably won’t ask about every game or app used. This approach protects games from review bombing and ensures people assigning scores are actual players of the games.
The randomized requesting system is also extended to the new Polls element being introduced. At random, and separate from ratings, players will be asked to rate how their play sessions went with a poll containing responses for various systems. With enough response data, Epic"s systems will generate tags for products for easy filtering by available content and to improve discoverability. Here are a couple of examples Epic provided regarding polls:
Players might be asked to respond "Yes" or "No" to "Is this game good to play with a group?". Players could also be presented with a multiple choice poll asking "How challenging are the bosses in this game?".
Aside from ongoing store improvements, Epic Games also released an update today to its Online Services platform that improves cross-play integration support for game developers. Find more information on that here.