Impulse gets integrated customer ratings

Been wondering when these'd show up.

Sounds cool. Hopefully Impulse will one day beat Steam.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Love it!!!

I agree.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

Most likely 3 stars is just the default starting rating.