User 479360
Banned
I really like it and am glad that it now exists.
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.
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.
Do you use half-stars to convert? And maybe if the 0-10 stars use half stars too, a quarter-star?
Is this same project, or does this have anything to do with CriticDna which was announced years and years ago?
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?
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.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.
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.
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.
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".
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.- 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
Kill Screen is a great site. You need better tastesI like this site. A lot. Helps weed out clearly shitty, clickbait critics (Kill screen, NZGAMER, etc many others) and still see an average from respectable sites. Well done, bookmarked!
Kill Screen is a great site. You need better tastes
Check out their fantastic Bloodborne review
That would be less of a problem if Metacritic added a few more bins to their histogramsYou 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.
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
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.
How exactly would you do that? Not every website has the same scoring system.
The same way you calculate the avarage. Why would the standard deviation be different?
Cool.We'll try to add that this week. That's a trivial feature to implement.
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.
No youtubers like myself I guess?
Do you guys ever use gamerankings.com? I like it better than meta critic. This opencritic seems like a prettier version of gamerankings.
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 doesnt have. Most notably you can exclude publications you dont 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 its already seen. As publications have their x weeks-in or post-patch review updates the score will update automatically to reflect them.
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.
OpenCritic is now publishing review embargo times on select titles.
Halo 5 and AssCreed Syndicate are the first examples
Fantastic! I am loving the site so far and it's already my go-to for review aggregation.OpenCritic is now publishing review embargo times on select titles.
Halo 5 and AssCreed Syndicate are the first examples
One question, though. It seems like some new releases aren't listed, like the 3DS game Legend of Legacy. Any idea why?