A single point cost Obsidian Entertainment its bonus on Fallout: New Vegas. Bethesda’s contract promised extra pay if the game hit an 85 on Metacritic. It landed at 84. That one-point gap, still cited by developers a decade and a half later, is the clearest argument for why review aggregators matter far beyond bragging rights. They decide bonuses, marketing budgets, and sometimes whether a studio keeps making the sequel it wants to make.
By September 2026, three systems dominate how players and publishers judge a game’s reception: Metacritic’s decades-old weighted Metascore, OpenCritic’s newer unweighted average, and Steam’s blunt, volume-gated user review labels. Each measures something different. Metacritic and OpenCritic summarize what critics wrote. Steam summarizes what people who actually bought the game think, days, weeks, or years after launch. Conflating the three, which happens constantly in marketing copy and Reddit threads, is where most of the confusion about “review scores” comes from.
This comparison breaks down how each platform actually calculates its number, what thresholds trigger which labels, where the systems get gamed or manipulated, and which one you should trust depending on whether you’re a player deciding on a purchase or a developer negotiating a publishing contract. It also covers two newer challengers in the space: CriticDB and VideoGamesCritic. For broader context on how these scores fit into the wider gaming landscape, see our gaming platforms coverage hub.
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A Brief History: Why Three Separate Systems Exist
Metacritic launched in 1999, before most of today’s players were born, and quickly became the de facto shorthand for “how good is this game.” Its dominance was never really challenged for over a decade, largely because no competitor bothered building an alternative. That changed in 2015, when OpenCritic launched with a direct, unambiguous pitch: everything Metacritic does, minus the opacity. The founders built the entire product around a single grievance, that nobody outside Metacritic’s offices knew how the Metascore was actually calculated, and that grievance is still the core selling point OpenCritic leads with a decade later.
Steam’s review system followed a completely different evolutionary path. It launched alongside Steam itself in the early 2000s as a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down mechanism, closer to a Yelp review than a critic aggregator. It wasn’t designed to compete with Metacritic at all; it solved a different problem, letting a platform with tens of thousands of games (Steam’s catalog now runs past 120,000 titles) surface a rough quality signal without needing a single professional review for most of them. Most games listed on Steam have never been reviewed by a traditional games outlet at all. For those titles, the Steam percentage isn’t a supplement to a Metascore, it’s the only aggregate signal that exists.
The 2025-2026 wave of new entrants, CriticDB and VideoGamesCritic, both emerged from the same underlying frustration that motivated OpenCritic a decade earlier, just aimed at different weak points. CriticDB targeted discovery and a stricter sample-size floor. VideoGamesCritic, arriving nearly ten years after OpenCritic, targeted something neither of the earlier two ever fully solved: the fact that a critic score calculated during a one-week review period stays frozen on a game’s page indefinitely, even after years of patches, content updates, and community feedback have changed what the game actually is.
What Metacritic, OpenCritic, and Steam Reviews Actually Measure
Metacritic and OpenCritic are both critic aggregators. They collect scores from professional outlets, normalize them to a 0-100 scale, and produce a single number that’s supposed to represent critical consensus at launch. Steam User Reviews measure something else entirely: a running tally of thumbs-up and thumbs-down verdicts from people who own the game on Steam, updated continuously for as long as the game is sold.
The practical difference shows up constantly. A narrative game can score 90+ on Metacritic and OpenCritic from critics who finished it in a focused, uninterrupted playthrough, then sit at “Mixed” on Steam because of a rocky launch week full of crashes that got patched a month later. Conversely, a scrappy indie game that critics largely ignored can accumulate thousands of “Overwhelmingly Positive” Steam reviews over years without ever cracking a Metacritic page with more than a handful of listed critics.
Neither number is wrong. They’re answering different questions: “What did professional reviewers think at launch?” versus “What do the people who actually paid for it and played it think right now?” Steam’s system is also unique in that it recalculates live, while a Metascore or OpenCritic average is effectively frozen once the review cycle for a launch window closes. That distinction matters just as much when comparing storefronts themselves, as our breakdown of Steam vs Epic Games Store and Steam vs GOG both cover in more depth.
Metacritic vs OpenCritic vs Steam Reviews: Full Comparison Table
| Category | Metacritic | OpenCritic | Steam User Reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Score source | Professional critics | Professional critics | Verified Steam purchasers |
| Averaging method | Weighted average, formula undisclosed | Unweighted average of all listed scores | Percentage positive of total reviews |
| Weighting toward “veteran” outlets | Yes, confirmed by co-founder Marc Doyle | No, every listed critic counts equally | No, every review counts equally |
| Score display | Single 0-100 Metascore per platform | Top Critic Average + All Critic Average | Text label (e.g. “Very Positive”) plus % |
| User/player scores | Separate “User Score” tracked apart from Metascore | Added late 2024; needs 20+ ratings to display | The entire system is player-driven |
| Minimum sample for top label | No public minimum disclosed | No public minimum disclosed | 500+ reviews for “Overwhelmingly Positive” |
| Score changes after launch | Rarely revisited once review window closes | Rarely revisited once review window closes | Continuously recalculated for life of listing |
| Review-bomb handling | No public automated system | No public automated system | Off-topic bombs auto-detected and excluded since March 2019 |
| Owner | Fandom | OpenCritic, LLC (independent) | Valve Corporation |
| Founded | 1999 | 2015, explicitly as a Metacritic alternative | Reviews launched 2003 alongside Steam |
| Tied to publisher bonuses/contracts | Yes, historically (e.g. Fallout: New Vegas) | Rare, not commonly cited in contracts | No public evidence of contract ties |
| Best for | Quick cross-platform critical snapshot | Transparent, filterable critic consensus | Live sentiment from actual buyers |
Metacritic’s Weighted Average: How the Metascore Really Works
Metacritic’s defining, and most criticized, trait is that it doesn’t average critic scores in the way most people assume. The company pulls in numerical or letter-grade reviews from a curated list of outlets, converts them to a 0-100 scale, and then applies a weighting formula that Metacritic has never published in full. Some outlets count for more than others in the final number.
Metacritic co-founder Marc Doyle told GamesIndustry.biz that reviews from “veteran critics,” meaning writers and outlets with a longer track record in the industry, are given more influence over the final Metascore than reviews from newer or less established sources. Doyle downplayed the practical effect, saying the gap between a weighted and unweighted score usually amounts to only one or two points. But as the Fallout: New Vegas case shows, one or two points is exactly the margin that can separate a studio from a contractual bonus.
That 2010 case remains the single most-cited example of why tying money to a Metascore is risky. Bethesda’s publishing deal with Obsidian for Fallout: New Vegas reportedly included a bonus clause triggered by an 85 Metascore. The game shipped to strong reviews but landed at 84 on PC and Xbox 360, and 82 on PlayStation 3. Obsidian missed the bonus by a single point on a formula the studio couldn’t audit or predict. Industry coverage of the incident, including a widely read Kotaku piece on developer bonuses, has kept the story alive as a cautionary tale well into the current decade.
Metacritic is owned by Fandom, which has consolidated a large share of the gaming and entertainment reference-site market over the past several years. There’s no publicly reported ownership change specific to Metacritic in 2025 or 2026, and the weighting policy that Doyle described has “always” been part of the system, according to his own comments, rather than a recent shift. What has changed is how openly the company has discussed it: the acknowledgment of veteran-critic weighting is now something Metacritic representatives state on the record rather than leave to speculation, as detailed in 80.lv’s 2025 report on the weighting policy.
OpenCritic: The Transparent Alternative, Now With User Scores
OpenCritic launched in 2015 with an explicit pitch: be the anti-Metacritic, and its site still describes itself as “Video Game Reviews from the Top Critics in Gaming.” Instead of a secret weighting formula, OpenCritic publishes a straightforward unweighted average of every numerical critic score it collects, alongside a separate “Top Critic Average” drawn from a subset of outlets the platform designates as top critics. Every review links back to its source, and the author’s name is displayed rather than buried, something PC Gamer highlighted approvingly when covering the platform’s launch as a Metacritic alternative.
One feature that sets OpenCritic apart from Metacritic is the ability to build a custom score. Users can select which outlets they personally trust and generate a filtered average based only on those sources, effectively letting a reader ignore critics whose taste doesn’t match their own rather than being stuck with one institutional number.
For most of its history, OpenCritic stuck strictly to critic reviews and left player sentiment to other platforms. That changed in late 2024, when the site quietly rolled out a player rating and written user review feature. According to community discussion tracking the update, a game needs at least 20 individual user ratings before OpenCritic will display an aggregate user score alongside the critic numbers, along with the ability to log hours played. That threshold is meant to prevent a handful of coordinated ratings from distorting a new feature the site hadn’t previously needed to defend against manipulation.
OpenCritic isn’t the only critic-side alternative that gained traction recently. CriticDB launched on January 30, 2025, positioning itself as a discovery-focused aggregator built around an unweighted average and a five-review minimum before a game earns a score badge, according to the platform’s own methodology page. GameSpew and Cog Connected both covered the launch as a direct response to lingering frustration with Metacritic’s opacity, and OpenCritic itself acknowledged the new competitor in a news post rather than treating it as a threat to ignore. Discovery-focused review aggregation isn’t the only place newer platforms are challenging incumbents; our look at itch.io vs GOG vs Epic Games Store covers a similar pattern playing out among storefronts.
Steam User Reviews: The Thresholds Behind Every Label
Steam doesn’t publish a single number the way Metacritic and OpenCritic do. Instead, every game gets a text label, ranging from “Overwhelmingly Positive” down to “Overwhelmingly Negative”, derived from the percentage of reviewers who clicked thumbs-up versus thumbs-down, combined with the total volume of reviews on file. The math behind the percentage is simple: positive reviews divided by total counted reviews. The complexity is entirely in the thresholds that decide which label a given percentage and volume combination earns.
According to a breakdown of Steam’s rating system published by Steam Page Analyzer, the top label, “Overwhelmingly Positive,” requires both a 95% to 100% positive rate and at least 500 total reviews. That volume gate matters more than most players realize. A game sitting at 97% positive with only 300 reviews doesn’t get the top label; it shows as “Very Positive” until it crosses the 500-review line, even though its percentage already qualifies. “Very Positive” itself generally covers 80% to 100% positive with a lower review count, while “Mostly Positive” begins at the 70% threshold. “Mixed” covers the broad middle ground, roughly 40% to 69% positive.
This structure means a brand-new release with excellent early feedback often can’t display Steam’s best label yet, purely because it hasn’t accumulated enough reviews. Developers watching a launch week sometimes see their percentage climb before the label itself catches up, which is a frequent source of confusion in launch-day social media posts.
How Valve Filters Off-Topic Review Bombs
Steam’s reputation for review-bomb vulnerability is older than its current defenses. Since March 2019, Valve has run automated anomaly detection across review activity looking for sudden spikes tied to something other than the game itself, a DRM dispute, a controversial statement from a developer, or unrelated politics, rather than actual gameplay feedback. When the system flags a spike as an off-topic review bomb, Valve identifies the date range of the surge and excludes every review submitted during that window from the game’s default score.
Those excluded reviews don’t disappear. They stay visible on the store page for anyone who wants to read them, and individual users can opt back into counting them toward the score they personally see, through their own account settings. Steamworks documentation states plainly that off-topic bomb reviews “will not contribute to your overall score” by default. This is different from genuine, on-topic anger, players who are furious about a broken patch, a removed feature, or a bad monetization change tied directly to the game. That kind of surge still counts, shapes the separate “Recent Reviews” score, and fades out of the 30-day recent window over time while the lifetime score gradually absorbs whatever positive volume follows.
The result is a system that’s messier and more exposed to short-term noise than a curated critic score, but also far more resistant to a single bad week permanently sinking a game’s reputation, provided the backlash is judged off-topic. A legitimate quality complaint, on the other hand, sticks around and keeps counting, which is arguably the more honest outcome for players relying on the label to decide whether to buy.
Metacritic’s User Score vs the Metascore: A Second, Often-Ignored Number
Most casual visitors to a Metacritic page only look at the big colored Metascore box and never scroll down to the separate User Score, a plain average of ratings submitted by anyone with a Metacritic account. The two numbers frequently diverge, sometimes dramatically. A game can carry a Metascore in the high 80s from professional critics while its User Score sits in the 40s or lower, usually a sign that a vocal segment of the community disagreed sharply with critical consensus over a specific decision, a monetization change, a divisive creative choice, or a technical issue that reviewers didn’t encounter during a pre-release build.
Because the User Score has no review-bomb detection comparable to Valve’s system and no minimum sample size requirement equivalent to Steam’s 500-review gate, it’s considerably easier to manipulate with a coordinated brigade than either the Metascore or Steam’s own label. That vulnerability is one reason industry analysts and journalists tend to treat Metacritic’s User Score as a much weaker signal than either the Metascore itself or Steam’s percentage, even though all three are, in theory, measuring some version of “how good is this game.”
The practical lesson for anyone reading a Metacritic page: the Metascore and the User Score are not two versions of the same measurement drifting slightly apart. They’re two entirely separate populations, professional critics on a deadline versus self-selected members of the public, and a large gap between them usually says more about a specific controversy than it does about the game’s underlying quality.
Why Publishers Still Lean on Metacritic Despite the Criticism
Given everything wrong with an opaque, undisclosed weighting formula, it’s a fair question why Metacritic remains the industry’s default reference point instead of the more transparent OpenCritic. The honest answer is inertia combined with recognition. Metacritic has a 27-year head start, and that history means nearly every major publisher, retailer, and even some hiring managers still default to citing “the Metacritic score” in press releases, store listings, and internal performance reviews, simply because it’s the number everyone already recognizes. That recognition reaches the top of the industry too: a report on Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka described continuing pressure to achieve high Metacritic scores for major releases.
That inertia has real consequences beyond marketing copy. Bonus clauses like the one that cost Obsidian its Fallout: New Vegas payout get written into contracts precisely because Metacritic is the shared reference point both a publisher’s legal team and a developer’s agent can point to without an argument over which aggregator to use. OpenCritic’s more transparent, auditable methodology hasn’t yet displaced that default, even among studios and journalists who openly criticize Metacritic’s opacity in the same breath as citing its number. Switching the industry standard requires enough studios and publishers to agree on a replacement at once, and so far that coordinated shift hasn’t happened, despite OpenCritic operating for over a decade as the more transparent alternative.
Pricing and Access: What It Costs to Use Each Platform
| Platform | Cost for readers | Cost for developers/publishers | Business model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metacritic | Free | Free to be listed; no pay-to-play, but critic access is curated | Ad-supported, part of Fandom’s media network |
| OpenCritic | Free | Free to be listed; developer dashboard tools available | Ad-supported and industry partnerships |
| Steam User Reviews | Free to read | Free; tied to a one-time $100 Steam Direct publishing fee per game | Bundled into Valve’s storefront, funded by Steam’s revenue share |
| CriticDB | Free | Free to be listed, five-review minimum for a score badge | Newer platform, discovery and PR-oriented |
| VideoGamesCritic | Free | Free to be listed | Independent, launched September 2026 |
None of the three main platforms charge readers anything, and none charge developers a listing fee either. The real cost to a developer isn’t monetary, it’s reputational and sometimes contractual, given how deeply Metacritic scores have historically been embedded into publishing agreements and, in some documented cases, studio compensation structures and hiring decisions.
Real-World Examples: Where the Three Systems Disagree
The clearest way to understand why these three systems exist separately is to look at how differently they can treat the same release.
- Fallout: New Vegas (2010): An 84 Metascore on PC and Xbox 360 (82 on PS3) cost Obsidian a bonus tied to an 85 threshold in its contract with Bethesda, despite the game going on to build a large, loyal Steam following in the years after launch.
- Onimusha: Way of the Sword (2026): Landed around 89 on Metacritic’s aggregation for the Switch 2 release, reflecting strong critical reception for the franchise’s long-awaited return after two decades away; see our full Onimusha: Way of the Sword review breakdown.
- Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition (2026): Scored around 90 on Switch 2, an example of a critic consensus tracking closely with early player sentiment, since From Software’s ports typically launch in stable, well-tested condition, as detailed in our Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition review.
- Live-service titles with rocky launches: Games that patch aggressively after a bad launch week frequently show a permanent scar on their all-time Steam review percentage even after quality improves dramatically, because the lifetime score blends early negative volume with later positive volume rather than resetting.
- Games with heavy day-one DRM or always-online backlash: These are the textbook case for Valve’s off-topic bomb detection, where a spike of negative reviews about a business decision, not gameplay, gets automatically excluded from the default score under Valve’s March 2019 policy.
The 2026 Challengers: CriticDB and VideoGamesCritic
Two new aggregators have entered the field since early 2025, both explicitly positioning themselves against the Metacritic model, and both worth understanding if you’re trying to figure out which score to trust going forward.
CriticDB launched on January 30, 2025, per coverage from GameSpew and Cog Connected, with a stated methodology built around simplicity: a pure average of attached review scores, no outlet weighting, and a hard requirement of at least five separate reviews before a game qualifies for a score and badge. That five-review floor is meant to stop a single early review from defining a game’s page before enough critics have weighed in, a smaller-scale version of the volume gating Steam applies to its own labels.
VideoGamesCritic is the newer and more structurally different of the two. Launched in early September 2026 by Moon Studios co-founder Thomas Mahler, the developer behind Ori and No Rest for the Wicked, the site flips the usual critic-first hierarchy: at least two-thirds of a game’s final score comes from player ratings, with press reviews included but structurally unable to outweigh player opinion. It’s also dynamic rather than frozen at launch. Reviews published shortly after a major patch or content update carry more weight in the current score than reviews from launch week, and early reviews gradually lose influence as a game’s live-service state evolves. That’s a direct rebuttal to the criticism that Metacritic and OpenCritic scores calcify at launch and never reflect a game’s later, sometimes much-improved, state.
Neither CriticDB nor VideoGamesCritic has displaced the big three yet, and it’s too early to know whether either will reach the traffic and industry recognition Metacritic and OpenCritic already have. But their existence, and the specific design choices both made in direct response to Metacritic’s opacity and its frozen-at-launch scoring, says something about where developer and player trust has been drifting.
5+ Use Cases: Which Score Should You Actually Check?
- Deciding whether to preorder or buy day one: Check OpenCritic or Metacritic for the critical snapshot, but weight it lightly, since neither reflects post-launch patches, server stability, or day-one bugs that only surface once a game is in millions of hands.
- Buying a game that’s been out for a year or more: Steam’s lifetime review percentage and label are far more useful than a frozen Metascore, since they’ve absorbed years of real player experience, patches, and DLC.
- Researching a live-service or early-access title: None of the traditional three are ideal here; Steam’s Recent Reviews filter (distinct from the lifetime score) or VideoGamesCritic’s update-weighted model are better suited to catching a game’s current state rather than its launch state.
- Negotiating a publishing contract as a developer: Understand that Metacritic remains the score most likely to be written into a bonus clause, precisely because of its industry-wide recognition, despite its weighting formula being undisclosed. Push for contract language based on OpenCritic or a defined review window instead, if you have leverage.
- Cross-checking a suspiciously high or low score: Compare all three. A game that’s “Overwhelmingly Positive” on Steam but mediocre on Metacritic and OpenCritic often points to a gap between what critics value (pacing, narrative structure, technical polish) and what a dedicated fanbase values (moment-to-moment gameplay, replayability, community features).
- Evaluating a game hit by a controversy, not a quality issue: Look at Steam’s Recent Reviews trend line around the controversy date and check whether Valve’s off-topic bomb detection kicked in, rather than trusting the raw lifetime percentage during that window.
Pros and Cons of Each Platform
Metacritic
Pros: Widest brand recognition in the industry; single easy-to-compare number per platform; decades of historical data for cross-generation comparisons.
Cons: Undisclosed weighting formula; confirmed preferential treatment for veteran critics; score is effectively frozen after the launch review window; history of being written directly into developer bonus contracts, with real financial consequences for a one-point miss.
OpenCritic
Pros: Transparent, unweighted average; customizable critic filtering; author attribution on every linked review; now includes a player rating layer gated at 20+ ratings for stability.
Cons: Smaller brand recognition than Metacritic outside dedicated gaming circles; user review feature is still new and less battle-tested against manipulation; also frozen at launch for the critic-side number.
Steam User Reviews
Pros: Massive sample sizes on popular titles; continuously updated for the life of the listing; automated off-topic review-bomb filtering active since 2019; reflects actual purchasers rather than a curated critic list.
Cons: Limited to Steam’s own player base, so it says nothing about console reception; new releases are capped below the top label until they cross the 500-review volume gate; on-topic backlash, even when narrow or overblown, sticks permanently to the lifetime score.
Migration Guide: Moving Away From Metacritic-Only Contracts
For developers and publishers still writing Metacritic thresholds into bonus or milestone clauses, the Fallout: New Vegas precedent is reason enough to reconsider the structure. Here’s a practical path for renegotiating or drafting new agreements.
- Audit existing contracts for any clause referencing a specific Metascore, OpenCritic average, or aggregate threshold, and flag the exact wording used, since “Metascore” and “critic average” aren’t interchangeable in a legal sense.
- Request the aggregator’s current listed outlet count and, where possible, ask whether the platform will confirm in writing whether weighting applies to your specific launch window.
- Where leverage allows, propose OpenCritic’s unweighted Top Critic Average as the contractual benchmark instead of Metacritic, since the calculation method is publicly documented and auditable.
- Add a grace period or review-window clause specifying the exact date range the score will be measured from, so a late-arriving review can’t unpredictably shift a bonus outcome weeks after everyone assumed the number was locked.
- Consider a secondary Steam-based milestone (for example, a lifetime review percentage measured 90 days post-launch) for PC-heavy titles, since it captures real buyer sentiment rather than a critic snapshot alone.
- Build in an appeals or reconsideration mechanism for edge cases, like a one- or two-point miss, given how well-documented the Fallout: New Vegas outcome remains as a cautionary precedent.
- Keep a change log of any aggregator methodology updates (such as OpenCritic’s late-2024 user review rollout) that could affect an active or future contract’s interpretation.
Common Mistakes Players and Developers Make With Review Scores
The most common misread is treating a Metascore and a Steam review percentage as measuring the same thing, then being confused when they diverge sharply. They’re not competing measurements of the same fact; they’re separate instruments pointed at different audiences and different points in a game’s life. A second common mistake is checking a game’s Metacritic page the week after launch and assuming that number is final and permanent, when in practice a handful of late-arriving critic reviews can still shift it before the aggregation window fully closes.
On the developer side, the most costly mistake remains what happened with Fallout: New Vegas: assuming a critic aggregator’s black-box formula will land predictably close to where internal QA and marketing expect it to. Because Metacritic’s weighting has never been fully disclosed, no studio can model the outcome with certainty, which is precisely the argument OpenCritic, CriticDB, and now VideoGamesCritic have each built a competing product around.
What GOG.com’s DRM-Free Philosophy Says About Ownership vs. Review Trust
Review scores decide whether you buy a game, but a separate, related trust question is what you actually own once you do. GOG.com has built its entire storefront around a different kind of transparency than Metacritic or Steam offer: distribution without Digital Rights Management. As the platform puts it, “that’s why we are fully committed to providing you exclusively with DRM-free games,” a policy stance published on the GOG.com blog explaining its DRM philosophy.
GOG.com defines the practical effect in concrete terms: “when you purchase a DRM-free game on GOG, you have the freedom to play it offline at any time, back up its files for security and video game preservation, install it on as many devices as you wish, decide whether to use a launcher or run it directly from the executable files, and even skip any updates that you do not prefer,” according to the same GOG.com blog post. The company also draws a direct line between DRM-free distribution and consumer control: “this grants you complete ownership and control over the game, allowing you to install, copy, and play it on any compatible device without limitations or the need for online authentication,” GOG.com states.
GOG.com’s own definition of the term is direct: “DRM-free indicates that a game is devoid of any Digital Rights Management, which means there are no restrictions imposed by the publisher or developer on how you can use the game,” per the company’s blog. And unlike Steam, where a client is required to launch nearly every game, GOG.com is explicit that its own launcher is optional: “GOG GALAXY remains optional,” the company confirmed in an official commitment statement on DRM-free gaming. That distinction matters for the same reason review-score transparency matters: it’s one more place where a platform either shows its work or asks you to trust a black box.
The Verdict: Which One Should You Trust in 2026?
There isn’t a single winner, because the three platforms aren’t actually competing for the same job. For a fast, cross-platform critical snapshot at launch, Metacritic still carries the most name recognition, but its undisclosed weighting formula and history of shaping real financial outcomes, like the Fallout: New Vegas bonus miss, mean it should be read as a rough indicator rather than gospel. For a more transparent, auditable critic consensus, OpenCritic is the stronger choice: the unweighted math is public, the outlet list is filterable, and the addition of a 20-rating-gated user score in late 2024 gives it a second signal Metacritic’s separate User Score doesn’t match in design clarity.
For understanding what actual buyers think, especially for a game that’s been out for months or years, Steam’s percentage-and-label system, backed by automated off-topic review-bomb filtering since March 2019 and a hard 500-review gate for its top label, remains the most useful live signal available on any platform, critic or otherwise. The newer entrants, CriticDB’s five-review-minimum model and VideoGamesCritic’s player-majority, update-weighted approach launched by Thomas Mahler in September 2026, are worth watching specifically because they were built to fix problems the big two still haven’t solved: opacity on one side, frozen-at-launch scoring on the other. The practical answer for most readers: check Metacritic for the headline number everyone else will cite, check OpenCritic if you want to know the number is calculated honestly, and check Steam if you actually want to know whether the game is good to play right now.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Metacritic’s weighting formula public?
No. Metacritic has never published the exact weighting formula behind its Metascore. Co-founder Marc Doyle has publicly confirmed that reviews from more established, veteran critics carry more influence than reviews from newer outlets, but the precise math remains proprietary.
How many reviews does a Steam game need for “Overwhelmingly Positive”?
A game needs at least 500 total reviews with a 95% to 100% positive rate to earn Steam’s “Overwhelmingly Positive” label. A game with a higher percentage but fewer than 500 reviews will display a lower label, such as “Very Positive,” until it crosses that volume threshold.
Does OpenCritic include player or user reviews?
Yes, as of late 2024. OpenCritic added a player rating and written review feature, but a game needs at least 20 individual user ratings before the site displays an aggregate user score alongside its critic-based averages.
What happens when a game gets review-bombed on Steam?
Valve has run automated anomaly detection on review activity since March 2019. When a sudden spike of reviews is judged off-topic, meaning it’s about a controversy rather than the game itself, Valve excludes those reviews from the default score for the affected date range. The reviews stay visible, and individual users can opt to include them in their own personalized score.
Why did Fallout: New Vegas miss its Metacritic bonus?
Obsidian Entertainment’s publishing contract with Bethesda reportedly included a bonus tied to an 85 Metascore threshold for Fallout: New Vegas. The game scored 84 on PC and Xbox 360, one point short, and 82 on PlayStation 3, meaning Obsidian did not receive the bonus despite widely positive reviews.
What is CriticDB and how is it different from OpenCritic?
CriticDB is a review aggregator that launched on January 30, 2025, built around a pure, unweighted average of review scores, similar in philosophy to OpenCritic. Its main structural difference is a five-review minimum before a game qualifies for a score and badge, intended to prevent a small number of early reviews from defining a game’s rating.
What makes VideoGamesCritic different from Metacritic and OpenCritic?
VideoGamesCritic, launched in early September 2026 by Moon Studios co-founder Thomas Mahler, weights player opinions for at least two-thirds of a game’s final score, with press reviews included but unable to outweigh player sentiment. Unlike Metacritic and OpenCritic, its scores are dynamic and recalculate over time, giving more weight to reviews posted after major updates rather than freezing the score at launch.
Can a Steam review score go down over time even if the game improves?
The lifetime score blends all reviews ever submitted, so a rough launch can leave a permanent mark on the overall percentage even after patches fix the issues. Steam’s separate “Recent Reviews” score, calculated from a rolling 30-day window, is a better indicator of a game’s current state than the lifetime label alone.
