Impulse gets integrated customer ratings

Thursday, October 8, 2009 by Frogboy | Discussion: Personal Computing

Ever wanted to see what people who actually bought a given game or application truly think of something? Impulse now supports customer reviews – from within Impulse, users can rate their games and applications on a scale from 1 to 5 stars.

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Rate the games and applications you have within the Impulse client

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The explore page on the ImpulseDriven.com website as well as within the Impulse explore tab will now display customer ratings.

Because of the ease of rating, the developers of Impulse believe that the programs will receive a much more accurate rating than what has traditionally been possible and in addition ensures that only those who actually have the program can rate.

Kitkun
Reply #1 Friday, October 9, 2009 12:11 AM

Been wondering when these'd show up.

 

GeneralEtrius
Reply #2 Friday, October 9, 2009 12:31 AM

Sounds cool. Hopefully Impulse will one day beat Steam.

Strand
Reply #3 Friday, October 9, 2009 12:59 AM

I have Impulse installed on more than one machine.  Up till now I've been rating games haphazardly, with the result being that I have different ratings across all the machines.  How does this new system take that into account?  Are my ratings now stored on your servers, and if not would it be possible to have ratings saved to my account instead of stored locally?

Are we perhaps going to get customer reviews as well at some future point?

Sareln
Reply #4 Friday, October 9, 2009 1:25 AM

Would it be possible to display a game's distribution of ratings, so that we can see if a 2.5 rated game has only 5's and 1's, or if it's mostly 3's and 2's?  Sorta like Newegg?  This wouldn't be on the main buy page (takes up too much room), but would be good information to have acess to.

Also, if customer reviews start being used, a "was this helpful to you button" on the review and an ability to rank reviews by helpfulness would be nice (as Amazon).

As a small aside -- I've always been annoyed at the popularity lightning bolts in the impulse store, mostly because I'm browsing for good, interesting games and don't particularly care how well a game is selling.  It felt like it was an attempt to translate a sales number (a rather dubious metric in digital distribution, as Mr. Wardell has pointed out from time to time) into a game recommendation, hopefully with the user ratings coming in, that feeling will vanish.

ToJKa
Reply #5 Friday, October 9, 2009 9:03 AM

Good idea, i've always trusted more to the opinion of the customers rather than the reviewers.

aLap
Reply #6 Friday, October 9, 2009 10:23 AM

Nothing like a good reading... but this is a nice starting point.

Trigeminal
Reply #7 Friday, October 9, 2009 10:57 AM

Kitkun
Been wondering when these'd show up.

Me too, I was planning to suggest it yesterday, as it seemed it might never happen without a little push, and then I noticed it was already up.  Thought I missed the memo.

 

Strand
I have Impulse installed on more than one machine.  Up till now I've been rating games haphazardly, with the result being that I have different ratings across all the machines.  How does this new system take that into account?  Are my ratings now stored on your servers, and if not would it be possible to have ratings saved to my account instead of stored locally?

I agree reviews should be stored server side on a per acount basis.

Strand

Are we perhaps going to get customer reviews as well at some future point?

Would be a nice addition to improve the community.  Seems very natural.  Gamestreamer.net, an impulse competitor that I have not tried, seems to have some really great examples of this.

Sareln
Would it be possible to display a game's distribution of ratings, so that we can see if a 2.5 rated game has only 5's and 1's, or if it's mostly 3's and 2's?  Sorta like Newegg?  This wouldn't be on the main buy page (takes up too much room), but would be good information to have acess to.

 

Love it!!!

Sareln

As a small aside -- I've always been annoyed at the popularity lightning bolts in the impulse store, mostly because I'm browsing for good, interesting games and don't particularly care how well a game is selling.  It felt like it was an attempt to translate a sales number (a rather dubious metric in digital distribution, as Mr. Wardell has pointed out from time to time) into a game recommendation, hopefully with the user ratings coming in, that feeling will vanish.

I agree.

 

I would also like videos and demo links to be a bit more present.

Zanyth0x42
Reply #8 Friday, October 9, 2009 11:38 AM

This is nice, though having something like Steam has for Metacritic would be great too

Sareln
Reply #9 Friday, October 9, 2009 6:40 PM

Looking at the store today, I think it would also be a good idea to make explicit the 0 star setup as being "unrated", and put in some threshold number of ratings for the customer rating to be displayed.

An explicit "unrated" status helps new launches avoid getting egg on their faces for not being rated yet (since right now, unrated looks a heckuva alot like 0/5 stars).

The display threshold would help obviate the problem of a display rating being based on only one or two ratings... though implementing a display of the ratings distribution would also solve that problem.  As to actual threshold number, well, I don't have access to the numbers, so I'll leave that up to the peopel who do.

Metacritic has it's uses, but I'm not the hugest fan of it, since it still reflects what a publisher has paid for as far as good press goes and is suceptible to non-owners of a game voting on the press or their fanboyism, rather than the actual experience.  If Stardock wanted to fold in metacritic into the whole rating system, I think it should fetch both the user-rating and the reviewer rating and display them side-by-side.

Zanyth0x42
Reply #10 Saturday, October 10, 2009 1:54 AM

Great points and I agree, showing both the ratings would be best!

Picciu
Reply #11 Saturday, October 10, 2009 4:48 AM

Would be good to have a small number near the stars that say how many people rated that game.

Picciu
Reply #12 Saturday, October 10, 2009 4:47 AM

Would be good to have a small number near the stars that say how many people rated that game.

HOOVERDAM
Reply #13 Saturday, October 24, 2009 3:30 AM

How are people rating games that have not been released yet? I have dragon Age on preorder and notice it has a 3 star user rating. No one has seen this game on impulse yet I thought this star rating could only be used by people who bought the game?

Trigeminal
Reply #14 Sunday, October 25, 2009 10:36 AM

HOOVERDAM
How are people rating games that have not been released yet? I have dragon Age on preorder and notice it has a 3 star user rating. No one has seen this game on impulse yet I thought this star rating could only be used by people who bought the game?


Wondered the same thing.  I have to figure an employee from stardock downloaded pre-release and follishly downrated.  I say foolishly because it causes questions like these.

Kitkun
Reply #15 Sunday, October 25, 2009 1:04 PM

Most likely 3 stars is just the default starting rating.

 

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