Hey everyone,
We didn’t know if we should be proud or outraged when we took a look at Metacritic this morning and saw that they had OpenCritic’s review data and information on their site.
On the positive side, we were excited to see another industry giant stand alongside companies such as Insomniac Games [1], Nvidia [2] and Telltale [3] in presenting OpenCritic as an authority. However, we’re frustrated that we did not receive recognition and have requested that they either credit OpenCritic or begin licensing our API and databases.
If you can’t see how they copied us, we wouldn’t blame you - we make subtle, near-invisible changes to various review data to tag it using a system we call “horsemen.”
For example, with PCGamer’s Blood and Wine review, we added a redundant slash after pcgamer.com. With Twinfinite’s review, we capitalized the “W” and “B” in the review URL.
We can't detail every example as it would giveaway our tells, but these two are notable: Metacritic’s Blood and Wine page currently has these exact horsemen listed, leading us to believe that they may be sourcing reviews from OpenCritic. We've included an archive.org link and screenshots below.
You can read more here
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sonjhb
Small update'response from OpenCritic team member
That was fast.
What's so bizarre about the incident is that we know Metacritic has to have a working system. There are multiple publications that are unique to Metacritic and vice versa. They're decently fast with major titles (though we're still faster).
But we're also pretty sure that this can't be a fluke. We checked a lot of places, including Neogaf and reddit. We feel that the only way they got those URLs is from OpenCritic.
Since multiple people have asked, we also don't think there's any legal case, and there's nothing that would kill our momentum and drain our funds faster than a lawsuit. The exception would be if Metacritic starts deliberately circumventing new protections that we'll be launching shortly. In some sense, this statement wasn't optional: if we ever did want a case, we're required to put out statements scolding this type of behavior.
But we do think it's a scummy thing to do. We're proud of the technology and relationships we've built and really do want to make the industry better for everyone: critics, developers and gamers alike. We enjoy the competition with Metacritic but would much rather that competition result in innovation than stagnation.