You can now rate games in the Epic Games Store. The new ratings appear alongside the Open Critic Rating Summary. But Epic doesn't let everyone have their say. Only randomly selected players are allowed to vote.
After ending a game, the provider will ask for feedback in the launcher in the future. However, not everyone is asked and not always. The basic requirement is to have played the game for at least two hours. The selection from this group is then made at random.
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Epic places ratings on the product page under the game name (image: Epic Games)
Epic puts ratings on the product page under the game name 
A second time the ratings can be found in the relevant section of the product page Chosen people have the opportunity to rate the title with up to five stars. This approach differs significantly from that of other platforms, where every player always has the opportunity to rate every title. This regularly leads to “review bombing”, the giving of negative ratings, for example due to copy protection or statements by the developers. Such judgments would not refer to the fun with the game and therefore not a basis for purchase recommendations, argue providers, although they can definitely be essential for a purchase decision. Shops are balancing on a fine line between their economic interests and those of the developers on the one hand and the interests of the customers on the other.
In the fight against this phenomenon, Valve, for example, has significantly reduced it with a number of measures, including the display of reviews over time and the automatic detection of review bombing. Metacritic, on the other hand, only allows user ratings with a time delay.
Epic, on the other hand, does not rely on an open, unregulated approach and approaches the problem from the other side. Player selection is intended to ensure that only people who actually play the game can rate and that there is no “bombardment” of bad ratings. However, criticism is also reduced by the fact that returning the game if you don't like it is only possible if you have played for a maximum of two hours. The vast majority of reviews are written by those who consciously want to keep a product.
Request Polls Properties
Also randomly, players are given polls at the end of their sessions for the most recently played game. Among other things, they ask whether a title can be played “well in a group” or how challenging bosses are. From the answers, Epic will derive tags that will be added to the product page. They should help to describe the properties of a game in more detail and over time also appear as a category in the shop to enable more precise searches. In addition, individual categories are to be created based on tags that are displayed on the shop's homepage.
In addition to the verdict, properties of the game are also randomly queried ( Image: Epic Games)