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OpenCritic - A new game-only review aggregator

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K

killdatninja

Banned
This site is really good! I whitelisted this on Ad-block plus but to my surprise no ad's in sight.

I like the idea for user reviews to be verified by their gamertag/id, genius. I wish more sites had stuff like this.
 
M

Mattenth

Member
FranXico said:
Just one question: what do you do with sites such as Eurogamer that no longer have a numeric score, do you scale it to 1 to 10 anyway? Because their intention behind leaving numbers behind was to also not influence aggregate scores, if memory serves correctly.
Click to expand...

No. If there isn't a clear verdict, we do not issue a numerical score.

Publications can also switch between verdict vs non-verdict. Some publications don't issue "verdits" for episodic games or DLC, but still offer quality review content, so we still aggregate those and flag them as "non-scoring." Note that they still need to be clearly marked as a review (read: filed on www.thedomain.com/reviews or whatever).

The one exception is Nintendojo, which is the only publication we have that uses letter grading, and we do convert their letters to numbers based on their historical conversion policies. We plan to handle these on a case by case basis depending on the publication's preference.

The six publications that we have that don't issue verdicts are Eurogamer; Kotaku; Washington Post; The A.V. Club; Totalbiscuit; and Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

One important thing for us was preserving "publication identity" as well as author identity. That's why we've opted to using the score format of the publication itself. So if the publication uses 0-5 stars, we display 0-5 stars. If they use 0-10, we use 0-10. If they use 0.0-10.0, we do 0.0-10.0. In Eurogamer's case, we grab their "Essential/Recommended/Avoid," and in Kotaku's case, we grab their "Yes/No/Maybe." Edit: One exception here is the publications that use 0-10 stars, which was just too visually jarring in our design, so we shrunk it down to 0-5 stars.

As a side note, Washington Post was an odd one. We did some random comparisons to Metacritc and found that Metacritic actually listed Washington post with a score. But when we looked at our data and searched across the Washington post, we couldn't find it. We even went out and bought physical copies of the Washington Post when they were running a game review, and yet we still couldn't see anything that implied a score (stars, letter, X/10, etc.). We reached out to their main author, Christopher Byrd, but never heard back. Still a mystery for us.
 
Y

YianGaruga

Banned
I guess the only thing that mc has right now over OpenCritic for me is the contrast between critic scores and user scores. Is it planned to add user scores in the future?
 
D

Driw3r

Unconfirmed Member
Is this same project, or does this have anything to do with CriticDna which was announced years and years ago? But nothing really happened after announcement. Just curious.

Looks very interesting.
 
M

Mattenth

Member
sleepwalkcapsules said:
Do you use half-stars to convert? And maybe if the 0-10 stars use half stars too, a quarter-star?
Click to expand...

We do use half stars. Thankfully, none of the 0-10 star publications use half stars, so quarter stars are unnecessary. We have a quarter star ready though, just in case that ever happens.

We used to joke that our old implementation of 0-10 stars looked a lot like common core math, heh.

Driw3r said:
Is this same project, or does this have anything to do with CriticDna which was announced years and years ago?
Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with that project, but we aren't affiliated at all. We started the company this past November.
 
Fbh

Fbh

Member
Site looks great and I like how you can ignore sites you don't agree with. I'll be using this one from now on

Some small suggestions:

- In the home page you have 3 bigh "highlighted" games (right now NBA, Fifa and Destiny). It'd be cool if you showed the score in this same site rather than having to press on "read reviews".

- Nitpicking but I'd love a "remove regular score" option next to the remove personal score option. I don't just want to see the score without counting Polygon (and others), I want to be able to act as if Polygon (and others) didn't exist at all

- As mentioned by others. An option to see the scores and closing coments from the sites in one column instead of 3 would be cool
 
O

Orayn

Member
YianGaruga said:
I guess the only thing that mc has right now over OpenCritic for me is the contrast between critic scores and user scores. Is it planned to add user scores in the future?
Click to expand...

You mean the numbers that get overwhelmed with 0's and 10's for any game that's even remotely contentious, or over stuff like Valve delaying/canceling a Halloween event? User scores can work, but they shouldn't be very granular at all due to the prevalence of review bombing.
 
B

Blanquito

Member
Hey, good job on the successful roll out. I always like seeing a well-built stack with Node, Express, Varnish, Nginx, etc. Should treat you well.

[Edit] and Material Design lite. Nice!

[Edit2] Though I'm not gonna lie, (from what I can tell) I'm impressed that you're using jQuery for the UI instead of a framework like React/Angular. Especially since you've built it with a RESTful backend. Impressive all the same.
 
Kagoshima_Luke

Kagoshima_Luke

Gold Member
Looks good, but I noticed it's not aggregating the site that I write for, which is odd, considering Metacritic and Game Rankings does.
 
G

Gurish

Member
Mattenth said:
No. If there isn't a clear verdict, we do not issue a numerical score.

Publications can also switch between verdict vs non-verdict. Some publications don't issue "verdits" for episodic games or DLC, but still offer quality review content, so we still aggregate those and flag them as "non-scoring." Note that they still need to be clearly marked as a review (read: filed on www.thedomain.com/reviews or whatever).

The one exception is Nintendojo, which is the only publication we have that uses letter grading, and we do convert their letters to numbers based on their historical conversion policies. We plan to handle these on a case by case basis depending on the publication's preference.

The six publications that we have that don't issue verdicts are Eurogamer; Kotaku; Washington Post; The A.V. Club; Totalbiscuit; and Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

One important thing for us was preserving "publication identity" as well as author identity. That's why we've opted to using the score format of the publication itself. So if the publication uses 0-5 stars, we display 0-5 stars. If they use 0-10, we use 0-10. If they use 0.0-10.0, we do 0.0-10.0. In Eurogamer's case, we grab their "Essential/Recommended/Avoid," and in Kotaku's case, we grab their "Yes/No/Maybe." Edit: One exception here is the publications that use 0-10 stars, which was just too visually jarring in our design, so we shrunk it down to 0-5 stars.

As a side note, Washington Post was an odd one. We did some random comparisons to Metacritc and found that Metacritic actually listed Washington post with a score. But when we looked at our data and searched across the Washington post, we couldn't find it. We even went out and bought physical copies of the Washington Post when they were running a game review, and yet we still couldn't see anything that implied a score (stars, letter, X/10, etc.). We reached out to their main author, Christopher Byrd, but never heard back. Still a mystery for us.
Click to expand...
MC will sometimes give a score based on their impression if there isn't one like with Washington Post, yea I know, it's crazy, it's just a guesswork by one of the MC's editors.
 
M

Messofanego

Banned
Mattenth said:
No. If there isn't a clear verdict, we do not issue a numerical score.

Publications can also switch between verdict vs non-verdict. Some publications don't issue "verdits" for episodic games or DLC, but still offer quality review content, so we still aggregate those and flag them as "non-scoring." Note that they still need to be clearly marked as a review (read: filed on www.thedomain.com/reviews or whatever).

The one exception is Nintendojo, which is the only publication we have that uses letter grading, and we do convert their letters to numbers based on their historical conversion policies. We plan to handle these on a case by case basis depending on the publication's preference.

The six publications that we have that don't issue verdicts are Eurogamer; Kotaku; Washington Post; The A.V. Club; Totalbiscuit; and Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

One important thing for us was preserving "publication identity" as well as author identity. That's why we've opted to using the score format of the publication itself. So if the publication uses 0-5 stars, we display 0-5 stars. If they use 0-10, we use 0-10. If they use 0.0-10.0, we do 0.0-10.0. In Eurogamer's case, we grab their "Essential/Recommended/Avoid," and in Kotaku's case, we grab their "Yes/No/Maybe." Edit: One exception here is the publications that use 0-10 stars, which was just too visually jarring in our design, so we shrunk it down to 0-5 stars.

As a side note, Washington Post was an odd one. We did some random comparisons to Metacritc and found that Metacritic actually listed Washington post with a score. But when we looked at our data and searched across the Washington post, we couldn't find it. We even went out and bought physical copies of the Washington Post when they were running a game review, and yet we still couldn't see anything that implied a score (stars, letter, X/10, etc.). We reached out to their main author, Christopher Byrd, but never heard back. Still a mystery for us.
Click to expand...

The weird one is Totalbiscuit, since he doesn't seem to do any reviews or even lists them as reviews. He even fully admits many times that his videos are just his first impressions very soon after the game starts, to see if the game hooks him early and doesn't do an overall summary of the game. I don't think he even completes the games.
 
A

Austriacus

Member
Messofanego said:
The weird one is Totalbiscuit, since he doesn't seem to do any reviews or even lists them as reviews. He even fully admits many times that his videos are just his first impressions very soon after the game starts, to see if the game hooks him early and doesn't do an overall summary of the game. I don't think he even completes the games.
Click to expand...

He completes them when they are short or just godlike.
 
M

Mattenth

Member
Fbh said:
In the home page you have 3 bigh "highlighted" games (right now NBA, Fifa and Destiny). It'd be cool if you showed the score in this same site rather than having to press on "read reviews".
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion. This is something we're actually running a small A/B test on right now.

We kinda set a policy of "Don't put score orbs in the masthead" because we felt like it put way too much emphasis on the score, and no emphasis on the reviews.

Fbh said:
- Nitpicking but I'd love a "remove regular score" option next to the remove personal score option. I don't just want to see the score without counting Polygon (and others), I want to be able to act as if Polygon (and others) didn't exist at all
Click to expand...
We love this idea too. Would be cool to be able to browse the site without seeing any scores at all, if that's the experience you want.
 
D

Dryk

Member
Orayn said:
You mean the numbers that get overwhelmed with 0's and 10's for any game that's even remotely contentious, or over stuff like Valve delaying/canceling a Halloween event? User scores can work, but they shouldn't be very granular at all due to the prevalence of review bombing.
Click to expand...
That would be less of a problem if Metacritic added a few more bins to their histograms
 
P

Pinkuss

Member
Thumbs up from me; love the UI, the customisability and the non weightedness. As an analyst I'd rather choose my own sources and have an average I can calculate (plus the UI is head and shoulders above; really like the hall of fame bit too).
 
V

Varth

Member
Lego Boss said:
I contacted MetaCrtic about this years ago and they weight the metrics in favour of 'big' publications. In the UK at least, EDGE and GAMES TM were seen as the scores with the most weight as they traditionally marked lower, so the overall would be pushed up by good marks there.

He didn't comment on IGN
Click to expand...

Yep, and they also have some interesting ways of choosing what publications to add or not to the panel for sure.
 
A

Azuardo

Member
The moment I heard about OpenCritic, I was very excited for it. Matt's been great with our team, listening to feedback and working to get features included that we think will benefit readers, publications and the site in the future.

The key points I've mentioned would be:

1. To separate multiplat reviews per platform (sort of in place atm, but only currently includes one review from the site, and not multiple, e.g. one site's PC, XB1 and Wii U reviews for same game).

2. Include mobile/handheld games, which is a huge market - including 3DS, Vita, iOS and Android.

3. Include older consoles, but more so for the re-releases and Virtual Console/PS Classics that get released, particularly because of games that get released in the West for the first time, but also because new generations of gamers will always be looking to see what's worth buying from classic ranges.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the site grows.

I also second the guy that mentioned being able to turn off the official score and just displaying your personal score (and even hiding all scores).
 
A

ANDS

King of Gaslighting
NightDriver said:
I wish these sorts of sites would report the Standard Deviation as well. Without a measure of variability, the average, alone, doesn't tell you a whole lot.

Not that I care what any of these critics think anyway.
Click to expand...

How exactly would you do that? Not every website has the same scoring system.
 
A

ANDS

King of Gaslighting
YianGaruga said:
The same way you calculate the avarage. Why would the standard deviation be different?
Click to expand...

Because the quantities aren't the same. Toss out the obvious ones like Kotaku that do not give review scores, and you are still left with review sites that operate on discrete "ranking" scores, and those that operate on a pseudo continuous scale. How do you "average in.. . ." these scores together?
 
F

FriedConsole

Banned
Still has very large audience requirements for publishers. Would like to see smaller sites get coverage.

In the interest of transparency, audience size should be publicly verifiable. Meeting any one of the following criteria is sufficient to fulfill this requirement:

Over 50,000 social media followers on any single channel
Over 75,000 social media followers across any three channels combined
An Alexa ranking higher than 100,000
Consistently more than 400,000 unique monthly visits on SimilarWeb
Consistently more than 250,000 unique monthly visitors on Compete
Any other extremely convincing public evidence that your reviews are consumed by more than 50,000 people.
Click to expand...
 
C

CazTGG

Member
Karak said:
No youtubers like myself I guess?
Click to expand...

Totalbiscuit is on it, even though he's said multiple times that he's not a reviewer and his content is more a first impression series than actual reviews.

So...no, its appears that YouTube reviewers like me and you aren't on the site.
 
Sanctuary

Sanctuary

Member
Parmadillo Marshmallow said:
Do you guys ever use gamerankings.com? I like it better than meta critic. This opencritic seems like a prettier version of gamerankings.
Click to expand...

All that ever seems to get mentioned is Metacritic, and all I ever use is Gamerankings.com.
And yes, Opencritic to me seems like a new and improved iteration of Gamerankings.
 
T

TheSeks

Blinded by the luminous glory that is David Bowie's physical manifestation.
astonish said:
OpenCritic, a new game-only review aggregator, has launched (full disclosure my friend helped build it and gave me the heads up that they launched today). It includes some nice features that MetaCritic doesn’t have. Most notably you can exclude publications you don’t usually agree with or build a score using only your favorite publications. Another big feature for me is the crawlers constantly scanning, even for games it’s already seen. As publications have their “x weeks-in” or post-patch review updates the score will update automatically to reflect them.
Click to expand...

SonyGAF's favorite site, confirmed. #HelloUncharted
 
Karak

Karak

Member
CazTGG said:
Totalbiscuit is on it, even though he's said multiple times that he's not a reviewer and his content is more a first impression series than actual reviews.

So...no, its appears that YouTube reviewers like me and you aren't on the site.
Click to expand...

Ya thats laughable that he is anywhere near a site like that. W
 
level1

level1

Member
Hella sexy design. Plus, review embargo countdowns, no user reviews and straightforward average calculation just made this my go to aggregator.
 
M

Mattenth

Member
The_Darkest_Red said:
One question, though. It seems like some new releases aren't listed, like the 3DS game Legend of Legacy. Any idea why?
Click to expand...

No 3DS or VITA titles :-\

We'll be adding them in December / early 2016. 3DS titles are especially painful as Nintendo makes it fairly challenging to get screenshots correctly attributed.
 
F

flatearthpandas

Member
Pretty neat, thanks for the link. Might need to actually read some reviews and figure out a good customized spread. Pretty bummed about no 3DS reviews though.
 
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