Thomas Mahler, the lead developer on the Ori games and the forthcoming No Rest for the Wicked, has launched a new website. It’s his answer to Metacritic and Opencritic, but fixes the biggest issue with those sites: their complete lack of saying just how much the gaming press sucks. VideoGamesCritic is a score-aggregating site that describes itself as “the one source of truth for gamers,” where player scores account for two-thirds of the weighting over those untrustworthy, and by implication untruthful, professional critics.
The methodology of the site is to take critic scores directly from OpenCritic and then combine them with “user scores” created by performing some peculiar “trust-weighted” math on Steam reviews, giving far greater weight to the latter. Then, with this information, the site is also able to tell you just how “wrong” or “right” a gaming site is by how far its own scores deviate from those of the masses. And if this weren’t already remarkable enough, this is even achieved for sites that don’t give review scores! Like Kotaku.
Last year Thomas Mahler lamented the dangerous cruelty of Steam reviews, after claiming being “review bombed” was going to bankrupt his studio, Moon. This was despite Moon’s latest game, the Soulslike No Rest for the Wicked, not being review bombed at all, and in fact receiving mild criticism for a bad update to its Early Access version. He then, rather impressively, declared that the press quoting him about being “review bombed” was proof of the failings of the press, and dropped in some transphobic remarks for a finishing flourish. So why is he now starting a project that puts the majority of its trust onto those self-same Steam reviewers he once suggested were an existential threat to his studio? Because the press is still worse.
In a post on X announcing the new site, Mahler wrote, “My main problem with the existing aggregators: Their scores tell you how the press felt about a game, not how players did.” VideoGamesCritic addresses this by giving two-thirds of the weight to the players. “Press still counts, it just can’t outvote the people who bought the game.”
I’m launching a website today: https://t.co/hy00lYYoXA
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.
— thomasmahler (@thomasmahler) September 2, 2026
The other motivating factor behind the project is slightly more coherent: Mahler wants an aggregating site that takes account of updates and changes to games during their lifetime. He rightly points out that the Metascore for a game like No Man’s Sky remains that which the game received during its very rocky launch, and isn’t reflective of the vastly different game that now exists ten years on. To reflect this evolution of the game, more recent Steam reviews have seemingly been given more weight than those from the distant past.
Steam reviews only allow those who write them a binary choice: they either recommend a given game, or they don’t. There’s no nuance to this, and it’s all notoriously prone to (genuine) review bombings based on disingenuous motives, but Mahler believes he has this under control. Reviews written by those with under two hours played in a given game are heavily downweighted, and then gradually given more credence until they reach 10 hours. (Reviews for games that are only five hours long are, we must assume, never to be trusted.) VideoGamesCritic also uses Steam’s own review-bomb detection function to try to remove reviews participating in such an effort from the grading. Oh, and best of all, it weights against those who activated a game via a Steam key, to prevent those pesky reviewers from sneaking their influence in that way.
And there’s far more weighting after that! You can read it all here. And because it’s all math, Mahler argues it’s transparent and free from bias. Which is very funny, when you consider that every bit of this cauldron of weighting is decided purely based on Mahler’s own biases, from the diminishing of press scores down. But fine! It’s his project, he can do as he wishes!
The math might math too math
This all gets a lot more bonkers when it comes to what Mahler calls “reviewing the reviewers too.” Finally we know who will watch the Watchmen. “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.”
Simple, definitely. But while the argument over where a review should sit between a “buyer’s guide” and “personal response” has raged for long decades, what no one who takes these things seriously thinks is that their only purpose is to be a prediction of how the wider public will react! Great criticism asks deeper questions beyond “Is it fun to fire the gun at the man?”, while ideally also answering that question too. Criticism can be personal and deeply subjective, with the deliberate goal of allowing the reader to reflect on such intimate thoughts.
But thankfully, Mahler has the math to fix such hifalutin thinking! This is how Mahler takes a review from a site like Kotaku, which very purposefully doesn’t assign scores in reviews, and assigns one anyway:
This reviewer publishes verdicts, not numbers, so trust comes from their recommend/pan calls: call accuracy (50%): when they say buy, do players end up satisfied, and when they say skip, do players agree; alignment (25%): do their recommendations sort games the way players do; and player-side (25%): on games where press and players sharply disagreed, whose side were they on. The blend is shrunk toward a neutral prior (60) so small histories can’t peg the scale, and recent verdicts weigh more (2-year half-life).
Anyway, godspeed to him and the site. It’s all entirely daft and superfluous, given you could just look at Steam reviews if you don’t care what us dumbass press idiots think, or the user scores on the aggregating sites that already exist.
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