In a World of Meme Reviews, Epic Got It Right

Steam. I love Steam. But I don't love Steam's "Customer Reviews". Not only do I not love it, I don't even like it. Sure, there are people out there who actually put some real thought into reviewing a Steam game. But 90% of the time? All you see are children, or adults acting like children, trying to out-meme each other with nonsensical non-reviews for what reason? Nobody knows. Then, there are also the review bombings and all the Steamoroids flare-ups (this involves individuals who are so unhappy that a developer decided to make some money and have its game exclusive to another game client and now that they have the ability to showcase that vitriol on Steam, they purchase the game and throw up a non-review). At this point, I don't think Valve cares anymore. I mean, since they introduced the Steam Points, meme reviewers are finding themselves as recipients of plenty of Steam Points Awards to further encourage their behavior.

Steam displays this as the most helpful review for Stray.

Meanwhile over at the Epic Games Store, things are a little different. While browsing their current sales event (sadly, I have purchased most of these games on Steam), I just saw an "Epic Player Rating" section. This shiny new feature was released last month apparently and I love it! Just look at this:

Clean and professional. The Epic Player Rating section for Sifu.

Most reviews confused themselves for synopses these days and sometimes, the simple descriptions as shown above is all you need to know about the player experience associated with the game. If you want the detailed explanation of how the player rating works, please click here, but basically, Epic would ask random users to rate the game after their play session and no, they don't have to write a meme, I mean, a review of the game. There are also polls in which the users can answer yes or no questions about the games played. Epic explained: "This approach protects games from review bombing and ensures people assigning scores are actual players of the games." Brilliant. I mean, after all the craziness found on Yelp, Steam should have known better than allowing users to write their own reviews of games. Even though I am sure that Valve is aware of Epic's approach to player reviews, I actually forwarded this discovery over to Steam and encourage them to follow suit. They may not want to renegotiate their revenue cut with developers, but the least they can do is spare us all the memes and other nastiness happening down at the review section.