Thomas Mahler of Moon Studios—the creators of the Ori games—has made a new review aggregate site called Video Games Critic. The whole pitch is to reflect the current state of a game instead of the launch state. Here's Thomas in the announcement tweet:

"The other big problem: Those sites rate a game once, at launch, and then never really touch it again. But that's not how games work anymore. A game can launch rough and get patched shortly after, but on Metacritic and OpenCritic it carries that scarlet letter forever."

This makes a lot of sense from the guy who said his studio was in danger when their early access title was "review bombed."

There is quite the page explaining how the aggregation works, but the gist seems to press the scales in favor of current Steam reviews, while critics, creators, and other aggregators take a smaller slice of the the total. Outlets are also rated and weighed by their alignment to those Steam reviews.

I think this approach makes a ton of sense given the current score-focused market and the malleable nature of games post-launch. Games like No Man's Sky or the PC port of The Last of Us Part I are much improved or, in the case of No Man's Sky, are wildly different than their launch vision. Therefore the scores today are wildly different than they would have been at launch. But, who is reading a ten-year-old review of No Man's Sky before purchasing it today? I'd argue no one is.

Video Games Critic is a site really trying to "math" the current apparatus of criticism and opinion. When the system is built upon and thrives off scores, then a website amalgamation like this is the natural byproduct. This is the shining example of why I don't score reviews and haven't since my days at DualShockers. The score is just a glanceable race to the bottom of criticism. Why is someone with a user name like "BingoBongoBosh" and "Fruitpunch22" have more weight than a John Linneman or a Ralph Panebianco (Skill Up)? They don't.

It'd be like going to the Amazon reviews section for the new iPhone and using them instead of reading John Gruber's review or watching Austin Mann's iPhone camera review. You'd be putting a whole lot of faith in that public review system. They can offer a pulse, but I'd argue they lack thought out criticism.

Scores are the problem and Video Games Critic exemplifies that. One of the explainers for score calculation captures it perfectly.

"Reviewers have never used the full 0 to 100 range: a "7/10" is press-speak for mediocre, and even weak games get a 6."

I don't think you can math your way out of this one.

It is funny how opinionated the design is for a site set out to minimize written opinion. You need opinionated design for something like this and I applaud the design. It's clean and ad-free and the explanations are transparent in their technicality.

If scores are your thing and you aren't just jumping straight to those Steam reviews, I think this is the site you want to use.