Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

[cornchip]

I’d love to see Valve’s statistics on what effect reviews actually have. Presumably they distribute enough games to assemble large enough cohorts of smaller games less boosted by press, marketing, etc.

[dsmart]

The review situation is even more embarrassing because the solution is both simple and already proven procedure. Just find some way to flag reviews, for example let the devs and the community do it. Then have each and every one of them checked by hand in a service center on the philippines. The costs would be relatively small but the effect big. Even 10k checked reviews per day would cost only peanuts.

edit: There’s a whole industry for services like this in the philippines.

All of that.

Also, us devs can flag them on the store page; but Steam moderators rarely do anything about it. The offending review will just remain as “flagged by the dev”, indicating that it wasn’t even reviewed. As I type this, I just checked. There are 7 wholly abusive “reviews” sitting on the store pages of my games marked as such; indicating that nobody at Steam even reviewed (the flags are removed when they are reviewed) them. The oldest one is from 2014.

I also mentioned in my thread this morning that there are lots of third-party companies that do this for other companies. All Valve has to do is hire them, setup some rules etc.

[Brad_Grenz]

Valve is allergic to solutions that involve employing humans. It’s one of the primary reasons we could use a strong competitor to them.

[Enidigm]

My only problem is the wisdom of the crowd tends to be the counterweight to review genericism. With the volume of games being released today it’s impossible to rely solely on professional reviewers.

Certain genres, or certain games, tend to quickly get passed over because, by chance, the kind of game isn’t congruent with the kind of games the majority of reviewers are interested in at the time. And if these reviewers review it at all, they tend to herd together and (it seems) the first couple big reviews set the pace for the rest. Reviewers also tend to take certain kinds of social criticism to heart, and the majority of reviewers today all seem of a similar place and type and disposition, and once something becomes “problematic” by whatever means, the 10 foot poles are quickly passed around.

In practice this has meant that most of the time in recent years, my opinion of particular games tends toward the Steam score rather than the Metacritic score. I’m far more likely to use the Steam score as a buying reference than any particular review.

The problem is that now that Steam scores have been politicized and weaponized, the scores in certain games or by certain developers can swing wildly as the suddenly not-so-wise crowd howls and throws poo.

Getting rid of scores at the storefront won’t eliminate crowd sourced reviewing, it will just cede that space to Amazon for games that are sold there. When I was buying a game for my niece and nephew on the Nintendo e-store, there were no reviews. No stars. Is it a good game? All the reviews online were the generic 7.5 kind. I guess close my eyes and swipe. While I appreciate consumer generated reviews are a pain to regulate (every review posted on a Nintendo site would have to be read and approved, and they’re just not going to do that), having no information wasn’t in any way an improvement.

[Grifman]

I read and I respectfully disagree :) The problem is easily solvable. Epic has solved it, Blizzard has solved it. We dont have to look very far. Let artists sell their games and make a store front the way they want. If developers or potential purchasers want to find out other players experiences then the internet still works. If people refuse to buy a Blizzard game because there are no user reviews right there next to the buy button then they should do that and move on. Simple.

I will leave you with this . Would everyone be in favour of anonymous comments to be posted tagging each of our posts & profiles here?

Like below this one or anyone else, there could be an anonymous review on your post and yourself personally?

Does that sound like it would be a helpful feature? What if you had zero ability to modify or remove those? Comments about you and your posts could only be deleted by say Stusser, one person, and there are thousands of anon comments posted each day, sometimes they get in the tens of thousands so naturally some stay up.

If folks here can somehow imagine that would be a good thing as it would help readers of Qt3 focus on the “high quality” posts and ignore the “bad” ones then fine. We have reached the end of the road with our thought experiment because I think that would be a terrible idea.

Start paying me for my posts and I’ll tell you what I feel about it then :)

[dsmart]

Valve is allergic to solutions that involve employing humans. It’s one of the primary reasons we could use a strong competitor to them.

Right. But we already established that EGS isn’t actually going to solve that review problem either. They’re just going to ignore it altogether. lol!

[dsmart]

My only problem is the wisdom of the crowd tends to be the counterweight to review genericism. With the volume of games being released today it’s impossible to rely solely on professional reviewers.

Certain genres, or certain games, tend to quickly get passed over because, by chance, the kind of game isn’t congruent with the kind of games the majority of reviewers are interested in at the time. And if these reviewers review it at all, they tend to herd together and (it seems) the first couple big reviews set the pace for the rest. Reviewers also tend to take certain kinds of social criticism to heart, and the majority of reviewers today all seem of a similar place and type and disposition, and once something becomes “problematic” by whatever means, the 10 foot poles are quickly passed around.

In practice this has meant that most of the time in recent years, my opinion of particular games tends toward the Steam score rather than the Metacritic score. I’m far more likely to use the Steam score as a buying reference than any particular review.

The problem is that now that Steam scores have been politicized and weaponized, the scores in certain games or by certain developers can swing wildly as the suddenly not-so-wise crowd howls and throws poo.

Getting rid of scores at the storefront won’t eliminate crowd sourced reviewing, it will just cede that space to Amazon for games that are sold there. When I was buying a game for my niece and nephew on the Nintendo e-store, there were no reviews. No stars. Is it a good game? All the reviews online were the generic 7.5 kind. I guess close my eyes and swipe. While I appreciate consumer generated reviews are a pain to regulate (every review posted on a Nintendo site would have to be read and approved, and they’re just not going to do that), having no information wasn’t in any way an improvement.

I am quoting this in it’s entirety to show my support for such eloquent analysis. Nailed it.

[Granath]

1. One person’s abusive review is another’s legitimate complaint. Let us not make the assumption that any review bombing is somehow automatically negative.

2. There are over 30,000 games on Steam. The number that have been review bombed are such a minority this entire point is a tempest in a teacup. If this is someone’s reasoning for not wanting reviews then find a better reason.

3. Some developers do not particularly like reviews because they can not control them. When honesty becomes an obstacle to your business then perhaps it is time to find another business. Others embrace reviews, respond with useful information and have been rewarded for it.

[Nesrie]

The problem is that now that Steam scores have been politicized and weaponized, the scores in certain games or by certain developers can swing wildly as the suddenly not-so-wise crowd howls and throws poo.

You say now like it’s a new thing. It’s really not. It’s been available and done for a long time. If players were solicited say at a certain hour mark to leave a review, you’re less likely to get a ton of reviews at once, outside maybe release dates or re-release dates or whatever the real release date is because of the EA and decade long alphas some of these games have.

Not every game has review bombing nor will they. The percentage of review bombing is low and no, it’s not always unfair. Some of these choices that were made led to very predictable results. For the negative reviews, they could be overwhelmed by just more reviews. Please note, again, I do not consider death threats a negative review… that’s a death threat and should be considered as one that happens to exist in a review.

In my experience about 1%, and yes, it would be vastly better if it was easier, and more convenient to leave a steam review. Its kinda buried in the UI.

This is pretty darn low. I am not saying everyone needs to write a novel with some sort of lengthy review to get rid of the rot in hell responses, but soliciting feedback, something a lot of other industries do, could help with just sheer numbers of responses. And to get quality reviews, maybe allow developers to assist with what a feedback form might look like. To leave a review right now, I have to what go to the Store Page, see the aggregate of the review responses… why? I don’t need to see what everyone else thinks. There is a good chance I already know the overall response due to professional reviews and articles but why not just ask if I am in the mood to write a quick review, and maybe in that review have a link to another form asking me to please submit support requests there and maybe have the review delayed until it’s addressed.

You’re not going to get rid of reviews as a way to get attention, without getting rid of reviews entirely which I still say is a symptom of the industry being afraid of their customers. You can, however, minimize it through tools.

[AK_Icebear]

I heard on a YouTube video that one additional negative of the EGS is no offline mode - an active connection is required to play games even once downloaded. Is this accurate? If so, consider it a damning nail in the coffin for me - I already skipped Hitman for similar reasons.

[Brad_Grenz]

You say now like it’s a new thing. It’s really not. It’s been available and done for a long time.

But that doesn’t make it OK, or explain why putting up with that needs to be the default expectation.

[Rod_Humble]

Its inaccurate at least for some games.

What you do (I swear this is not a joke) is put the command line " -EpicPortal" * in your shortcut for the app and it works offline forever.

Whether thats better or worse than Steam is somewhat up for discussion, I think its both. Bizarrely.

*this it turns out, is utter bullshit. I tested it and this only applies to Subnautica. So yes you need to be online to play the games you bought. Which is outrageously bad and a deal breaker.

[Nesrie]

But that doesn’t make it OK, or explain why putting up with that needs to be the default expectation.

It’s also not unique to gaming. The other industries manage to handle it without deciding the answer is to stop getting feedback from their customers. You put up with it because supposedly you’d like to have and keep customers which means you engage them. Reviews are only one system of engagement. If they’re not using the other systems, time to look at those other systems, not just yank reviews.

[dsmart]

I heard on a YouTube video that one additional negative of the EGS is no offline mode - an active connection is required to play games even once downloaded. Is this accurate? If so, consider it a damning nail in the coffin for me - I already skipped Hitman for similar reasons.

Yes - it’s true.

[Mysterial]

What you do (I swear this is not a joke) is put the command line " -EpicPortal" in your shortcut for the app and it works offline forever.

I suspect that’s a lazy hack around them not having backend services available to the game and will go away once they do.

[stusser]

I don’t see why. You can run lots of Steam games without Steam, typically single-player titles without Steamworks DRM.

[easytarget]

The recent talk on reviews reads mostly like people talking past each other while oversimplifying what the other side said.

Very much in keeping with the general tenor of this thread, so carry on.

[stusser]

It’s a microcosm of the internet as a whole.

[Rock8man]

For what it’s worth, I’m sad that this discussion is going to be forgotten/lost in a week because it happened in a topic with 100 posts/day.

Agreed. That was a great discussion about reviews and customer feedback and ways to make it better, approached from several different angles. It’s a shame the discussion is buried in a thread about the Epic Games Store. @tomchick, would it be too much work pluck it out into a different thread?

[tomchick]

@tomchick, would it be too much work pluck it out into a different thread?

Can you link me to the post you’re talking about? It’s trivially easy to pull it and all its responses and put them in a new thread. My only reservations would be with messing up the thread it’s taken from. But, yeah, I’m always happy to preserve interesting discussions in an easier-to-find and easier-to-read thread.

-Tom