Currently, the rating system works as intended, a basic like/dislike ratio that determines the game’s “reputation”.
The issue with this system is that it does not account for current, recent votes, rather takes all votes since the game’s creation date until present, which often causes issues for new and underrated creations.
As a developer in this platform, it is currently hard to improve your game’s rating because (as stated earlier), the current rating system takes all the votes from creation to present and creates an average from that data, so if a game had a bad moment (i.e. a buggy era, review bombs, and the like), it could be stuck at a relatively low rating until the game gets enough votes to outvote the accumulated dislikes, which, depending on how early the game was created and how severe the vote bias is, this can severely impact your game’s influence of the algorithm, and viceversa, if a game has a ton of upvotes accumulated for a long period of time, it would still be labeled with a good rating, because even if the game is doing something that is making players mad, there won’t be enough user feedback to outweight the past (and probably outdated) feedback, giving the game some sort of “immunity”, and basically allowing the game to neglect their playerbase without great repercussions.
Given how players often just vote and forget (especially on negative feedback, users often dislike and leave the game), it becomes extremely hard to undo the damage.
Not only this affects the recommendation algorithm! This will also affect the users that discover the game for the first time, as (for example), they will see a 50-60% rating and say “This game is bad, it has a low rating”, but what if the game is a good game, and everyone playing it loves it? It won’t make much of a difference, because the rating will still be low despite multiple users upvoting the game, and this also happens viceversa, the game could have 85-95% rating but the new player would be disappointed after joining the game if the game is not currently in a good state.
So, what’s my suggestion? I’d like to propose a “dynamic” rating system.
It’s quite simple, displayed votes are recent votes from up to a 60 day period, total accumulated votes would be displayed at the game details below (where the players are shown in the website, for example), so that rating will still be shown and not discarded.
The displayed votes would be shown in the game’s icon on the website, and when entering the game page, it would show recent votes at the top, and all-time votes below the game’s description.
I believe that this way, creators will be able to listen to player feedback and improve their game, having those changes being reflected in a short period of time, and allowing their game to be picked up by the algorithm & also having the chance of giving a good impression to new users that have never played the game. This also allows users that have left the game to see if the game has improved or decayed over the last 60 days, which also gives a chance for games to be replayed.
This could also improve the front page, as games that were recently rated positively should be shown more frequently, and will be constantly being refreshed as votes would be constantly changing.
Not to mention that some platforms (such as Steam) already do this, showing recent votes over all-time votes, which has proven to work incredibly well.
So, that concludes my suggestion. Thank you for reading.
