RikPixel 👾

Hey folks, I'm launching a website today: videogamescritic.com 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. Then the thing kept growing, and at some point I realized it had become genuinely useful for any gamer, not just me. So here it is, for everyone. My main problem with the existing aggregators: Their scores tell you how the press felt about a game, not how players did. That made sense 20 years ago. I cared a lot what GameSpot gave a game back then. But today we can actually measure how players felt, and to me that will always matter more than how the press did. On videogamescritic.com, players hold at least two-thirds of every score, by rule. Press still counts, it just can't outvote the people who bought the game. 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. No Man's Sky is the obvious example: Famously rocky launch, and Hello Games has spent the years since relentlessly improving it. Its Metacritic score has never moved. On videogamescritic.com it launched at 50 and sits at 82 today, because scores here are LIVE: launch-era reviews fade out over time, and reviews written after a significant patch count the most. When player sentiment changes, the number changes. Simple. And since press does still count, I ended up reviewing the reviewers too. Every outlet and creator gets a trust score based on one question: When they reviewed a game, did players end up agreeing? You can see who consistently calls games the way players see them, and who doesn't. Again, simple and fair. And everything is transparent. Every game page shows exactly how its score was computed, and the full methodology is public. No editorial opinion, no magic number. Anyway, I hope you get a kick out of it! Even just as a way to see the best games on each platform, find something you missed, or browse a site that isn't wallpapered in ads, I think it's already pretty useful. Enjoy!👍❤️