Thomas Mahler, lead developer of the Ori games and the forthcoming No Rest for the Wicked, has launched VideoGamesCritic, a new review-aggregation website intended to offer an alternative to established services such as Metacritic and OpenCritic.
The project gives player feedback considerably more influence than professional reviews. Two-thirds of its overall weighting comes from a trust-adjusted analysis of Steam reviews, while critic scores sourced from OpenCritic account for the remaining third. The website describes itself as “the one source of truth for gamers”.
VideoGamesCritic also attempts to assess how closely individual outlets and creators’ verdicts match the eventual response from players. That approach means the platform can estimate a score for publications that do not use numerical review ratings.
Mahler previously criticised the volatility and potential cruelty of Steam reviews after claiming that his studio, Moon, was being review bombed and could face bankruptcy. The controversy followed criticism of an update to the Early Access version of the Soulslike No Rest for the Wicked. He also argued that coverage of his comments demonstrated problems within games journalism and made remarks that drew accusations of transphobia.
That history makes the new service’s reliance on Steam users notable. Mahler’s stated position is that existing aggregators primarily show how the press responded to a game, rather than how the people who purchased it felt.
In a post on X, Mahler said professional reviews would still count, but would not be able to outweigh the opinions of players. He explained that the website began as a personal database built because he found the user experience of existing aggregators incomplete.
For readers following wider arcade and gaming news, the project is an interesting example of how review data is increasingly being treated as a technical problem rather than solely an editorial one.
“I’m launching a website today. It started as a little database I built for myself. I use Metacritic and OpenCritic a lot and they’re clearly useful, but to me as a designer the user experience always felt a bit lacking.”
Another goal is to account for how games change after release. Mahler points to No Man’s Sky as an example: its aggregate score still reflects its troubled launch period, despite the substantial differences between that version and the game available years later. VideoGamesCritic appears to address this by giving newer Steam reviews greater influence than older ones.
How the player weighting works
Steam reviews offer a simple recommendation choice: users either recommend a game or do not. The system does not capture every shade of opinion, and review bombing can distort the result for reasons unrelated to a game’s quality.
VideoGamesCritic attempts to reduce some of those problems by heavily discounting reviews from accounts with fewer than two hours played. Their influence increases progressively until the reviewer reaches 10 hours. The system also uses Steam’s review-bomb detection feature to exclude reviews identified as part of a coordinated campaign.
Reviews posted by users who activated a game with a Steam key receive less weight as well. The methodology includes additional calculations covering the age of a review and other signals. The published methodology explains the full process.
Mahler argues that a formula-based system is transparent and less vulnerable to bias. However, the decisions about which factors matter, how heavily they are weighted and how critic scores are reduced remain design choices made by the creator of the service.
Can a website score the reviewers?
The most unconventional feature is what Mahler calls “reviewing the reviewers too”. Each outlet or creator receives a trust score based on whether players later agreed with its verdicts.
That model treats criticism primarily as a prediction of how the broader audience will respond. Traditional reviews can serve that purpose, but they can also be personal responses that examine a game’s themes, design, cultural context and emotional effect. A critic’s value is not always determined by whether their conclusion matches the majority view.
The system nevertheless applies its calculations to reviews without numerical scores. For a publication using recommendations rather than ratings, the proposed formula considers three elements: whether “buy” and “skip” calls proved accurate, how well those recommendations sorted games compared with player opinion, and which side the outlet favoured when critics and players strongly disagreed.
Those results are then pulled towards a neutral starting point of 60 so a small sample cannot produce an extreme score. Recent verdicts receive greater influence through a two-year half-life.
Mahler describes the approach as transparent and free from bias. Whether players find the resulting rankings more useful than existing critic or user scores will depend on how clearly the service explains its calculations and how well its safeguards perform over time.
For now, VideoGamesCritic offers another way to interpret game reception: a system that prioritises player recommendations, adjusts for ongoing updates and assigns trust scores to reviewers. It may appeal to readers who want a data-led purchasing signal, while leaving open the larger question of what game criticism is meant to do.
That question also matters when choosing interactive entertainment for a home setup, whether you are comparing a full-size arcade cabinet, a compact bartop arcade or planning a custom build with DIY arcade hardware.
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