Epic Games has finally introduced a rating system to its online store, and it’s designed to prevent waves of negative user reviews from happening simultaneously, a practice commonly known as review bombing. goes.
According to a blog post by Epic’s Craig Pearson, instead of allowing anyone to review their own game, random players who have played the game for more than two hours are asked to review it on a five-star scale. will be asked to Those points would then be aggregated to form an “overall rating” for each game.
Sometimes, review-bomb campaigns can legitimately indicate harmful consumer practices, but they are often used to oppose a producer taking a political stance or if the media featured people from marginalized backgrounds. Is. Movie sites like Rotten Tomatoes have had to make changes to moderate success in dealing with review-bombing trolls. Most recently, Disney Plus’ Obi-Wan Kenobic When Disney and Lucasfilm condemned the racist attacks on cast member Moses Ingram, the review was bombarded. Valve has struggled with this issue as well, announcing in 2019 that it would hide off-topic review scores.
Epic believes that the implementation of reviews will prevent review bombing and will not be an excessive burden for players. “Because these requests are random, we won’t spam our players, and we probably won’t ask for just about every game or app,” Pearson says. “This approach protects the game from review bombing and ensures that the people assigning scores are the actual players of the game.” But review-bombing campaigns are a major challenge for many tech companies — even Google has systems in place to weed out bad faith reviews — so we’ll see how Epic’s approach works in practice.
Epic will also be randomly voting players about their most recent play session to help create tags for products on the Epic Games Store.