The company always said that the EGS won’t feature forums because they only bring toxicity and aren’t popular amongst developers. It also won’t include user reviews because of their potential for review bombing. This week, years after the Epic Games Store first launched, two new features arrived that aim to replicate a version of user reviews and tags. Game Ratings are sort of like reviews, except users can’t actually write anything - there’s only a star rating on a five-point scale. Those who played a game for more than two hours can leave a rating, but there’s one extra wrinkle: only random players will be asked to leave a rating. These surveys will pop up after you’re done playing a game. As more players leave their own rating, the games’ store pages will display an Overall Rating. Epic said it won’t “spam our players”, and you shouldn’t expect to be asked to rate every game you play. “This approach protects games from review bombing and ensures people assigning scores are actual players of the games,” said Epic. Game Polls, however, are effectively the Epic Games Store’s version of tags. Like ratings, players will be randomly asked to answer polls about games they played. The multi-option questions are intended to populate game tags, and will cover things like difficulty, multiplayer requirement and so on. Like ratings, polls will also be reflected on game store pages once enough of them have been answered. The tags will also be used to create custom categories, and allow players to sort using them.
