The Epic Games Store has integrated OpenCritic reviews so that shoppers can see which titles come recommended by the review aggregator.
As highlighted by the Epic Games Store’s director of publishing, Sergey Galyonkin, store pages will now show consumers how many critics recommenced any given title, displaying blurbs from select reviews alongside a percentage rating.
Galyonkin noted that the storefront will favor reviews from “high-notoriety publications” when possible in a bid to “maximize consumer confidence.” For example, the store page for Control (shown below) places reviews from large publications like PC Gamer, GamesRadar, and Eurogamer front and center.
For those of you unfamiliar with how OpenCritic works, the aggregator doesn’t average out review scores, but rather asks critics to state whether they’d recommend a game to general players when uploading their review metadata.
“For numeric reviews written by top critics, publications may elect to set their own threshold for what is and isn’t recommended. For publications that have not made an election, the threshold is set to the publication’s median review score. Reviews at or above this threshold are considered recommended,” explains the OpenCritic FAQ.
“Non-numeric reviews written by top critics that have a clear verdict and verdict system are also included when recommended. For example, Eurogamer (Recommended, Essential), AngryCentaurGaming (Buy), and GameXplain (Liked-a-lot, Loved) have their reviews included in this metric.
“[Non-numeric] reviews written by publications such as Kotaku, TotalBiscuit, the Washington Post, or Rock Paper Shotgun are not included in any score calculations.”
Epic founder and chief exec Tim Sweeney has previously promised to bring user reviews to the marketplace, but explained the system will be opt-in because “review bombing and gaming-the-system is a real problem.” It’s unclear when, however, that system will be implemented.
