The Epic Games Store has introduced a games rating system, something it has been painfully missing up to now. This comes in the form of integration with OpenCritic, a site telling how many critics recommend buying a particular game across professional media sites and gaming blogs.
This is different from Metacritic which shows an average score for a game.
The Outer Worlds, for example, is recommended by 91% professional reviewers, according OpenCritic:
Screenshot of The Outer Worlds page on the Epic Games Store
So, there you have it. Ever since the Epic Games Store launched in the end of 2018, the lack or reviews or ratings system has been a major point of criticism. Steam, for comparison, offers user reviews and the Metacritic score.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, however, has been saying from very early on that the EGS will not use a user reviews system. The rationale behind it is that on Steam, users systematically use the system for review-bombing, and that Epic Games wanted to avoid.
Steam itself seems to have finally acknowledged this problem last year when Borderlands 2 got review-bombed over Take Two’s decision to publish Borderlands 3 exclusively on the Epic Game Store. Back then, some of prominent developers, including Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail, suggested that storefronts are better off without user reviews.
All previous Borderlands games getting review-bombed over Take Two’s decision to publish on the Epic Game Store first is ridiculous. User reviews are slowly becoming less and less defensible as a measure of game quality, and platforms without them a safer bet for launch.
— Rami Ismail (@tha_rami) April 3, 2019
No matter how you look at it, the Epic Games Store is growing and growing fast. Earlier this week, Tim Sweeney said the audience of EGS reached 108 million people.