Thomas Mahler, game director of No Rest for the Wicked and creator of the Ori series, has launched aNew Game Review Aggregation Site—VideoGamesCritic. He aims to give ordinary players more influence than professional media reviews. On the site, two-thirds of the final score comes from Steam players, while the remaining one-third comes from professional media.
VideoGamesCritic is a review aggregation site that claims to be "the only trusted source of reviews for players," with Steam player ratings accounting for two-thirds of the score, while those "untrustworthy media ratings" make up the remaining one-third.
The site's approach involves pulling critic scores directly from OpenCritic and combining them with a "user score" generated through a special "trust-weighted" calculation of Steam reviews, where user scores carry significantly more weight than critic scores. Using this data, the site can also indicate whether a particular gaming website's rating is "wrong" or "right" based on how much it deviates from the general consensus.
Thomas Mahler stated on social media: "My main grievance with existing game review aggregation sites is that their scores reflect critics' opinions rather than players'. VideoGamesCritic addresses this by giving players a two-thirds weight. Critics' reviews still matter, but they shouldn't outweigh the players who actually buy the games."
Another motivation behind VideoGamesCritic is clearer: Mahler wants to create an aggregation site that tracks updates and changes to games throughout their lifecycle. He pointed out that games like No Man's Sky still have Metascore ratings stuck at their difficult initial launch phase, failing to reflect the dramatic transformations the game has undergone over the past decade. To capture this evolution, recent reviews on Steam appear to carry more weight than older ones.
"Blood of Dawnwalker" has a Metacritic critic score of 83, but only 69 on VideoGamesCritic
